


The (First and) Only Rule That Matters

by Redring91



Series: Broken Rules and Consequences [3]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (TV Movie 1996)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Asexual Character, Asexual Doctor (Doctor Who), Asexual Relationship, Asexuality Spectrum, Bending the Rules is not the same as Breaking them, Broken Rules always have Consequences, But not all Time can be re-written, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Depression, Emotional Intimacy, Flashbacks, Forgiveness, Friendship, Gen, Genocide, Grief/Mourning, Has the Time War been mentioned lately?, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Loneliness, Love, Memory Alteration, Mental intimacy, Multiple Selves, Names are important to Time Lords, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reconciliation, Recovery, Regeneration, Self-Acceptance, Self-Hatred, Self-Worth Issues, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, The Doctor has complicated relationships, The Master Has Issues, Time Lords only call The Doctor when they want help, Time Travel complicates things, Time can be re-written
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-07-29 22:31:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16273691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redring91/pseuds/Redring91
Summary: -“I thought Rule One was ‘The Doctor lies.’”He shakes his head. “Those are our rules,” he clarifies. “I mean, the rules for us, as in you and me.” He waves a hand between them self-consciously before sighing. “The Rules of Time are different. The consequences for bending – or breaking – them are different.”Something in his tone must resonate with her. River glances down at the diary on her lap, smoothing her fingers over the cover. “This First Rule, the one that matters.” She meets his gaze again. “What is it?”“The First and most Important Law of Time,” he tells her gravely, “is that you are expressly forbidden, in all circumstances, to interact with any of your other selves.”She takes the pen he offers her, opening her diary to a blank page. He takes a moment to breathe.“Let me explain to you why.”-





	1. Echoes of a Future Past (Nine)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -
> 
> For those who haven’t read the previous instalments in this series, I strongly recommend you do so. To everyone else, once again: welcome back! I hope you all enjoy the New-Who portion of the story. This segment will span up until the end of Matt Smith’s tenure (and regeneration into Peter Capaldi).
> 
> Regarding the relationship tags: As I’ve stated earlier in this series, I headcanon The Doctor as being on the asexual spectrum, and the lack of slash tags up to this point was more about episode-canon. So while I’ve now added slash tags for a few of the specific relationships I’m going to focus on, you can still ship-or-not at your own discretion.
> 
> Nine, and The Doctors who follow him, suffer from complex-PTSD, survivor’s guilt, and depression, resulting in a lot of self-destructive behaviour. It gets plenty worse before it gets any better.
> 
> -

-31-

His investigation into the presence of the Nestene Consciousness leads him to a department store building. His scans indicate the power signature he’d detected is coming from a relay device on the roof. So, he breaks into the building and skulks around the basement, searching for anything out of place. It’s a curious thing, that you never think about how many plastic mannequins there are in a shop until you realise every single one of them is a potential Auton.

He finds a body in one of the stock rooms.

He checks for a pulse, despite the obvious signs that the man’s been dead awhile. (The absence of colour clinging to the corpse makes this clear.) By the looks of him, the man had been the chief electrician. His lifeless eyes are still wide with the terror of his final moments.

He closes the man’s eyes.

He leans back, pressing a fist against his chest, against his dark burgundy shirt. (A constant reminder of the cruelty of his own survival against every other lost life.) He tries not to wonder what the man’s name was. (Tries not to think of another man without a Name.)

The distant sound of a woman’s voice, echoing off the walls, cuts through the fog of his thoughts.

(Eight started counting the lives he saved one at a time and it was almost enough.)

He finds the woman backed up against a wall, surrounded by Autons, closing in on her. He grabs her hand. “Run!”

They sprint down the corridor together and into an elevator. He grapples with an Auton, whose fingers are twitching towards his neck, and he manages to pull the arm off the mannequin, so the doors can slide closed. He tosses the disconnected arm over to the woman.

She babbles, her voice tense as she tries to mask her earlier panic, but he can see the purple wash of fear still clinging about her. He doesn’t really look directly at her, volleying words over his shoulder about it not being a prank as he waits for the elevator to stop moving.

“Who’s Wilson?”

The chief electrician. At least he knows what the man’s name was now. (It’s better to know their names.)

“Wilson’s dead.”

Of course, this doesn’t reassure the woman; her stress levels rocket to a bright fandango as she scurries after him. She demands answers, so he gives them, brash and matter-of-fact. As he reaches the doorway he turns to face her.

“I might well die in the process. But don’t worry about me.”

As he looks at her, there’s a moment (a Moment) when her lost expression doesn’t seem to match what he’d expected to see on her face. But when he tries to pin down the reason for that thought (“it’s from your past…or possibly your future”), it’s like trying to catch smoke.

He shuts the door behind him. Starts to walk away. Pauses.

(For some reason, he doesn’t feel good about walking away without having asked who she is.)

He opens the door again.

“I’m The Doctor, by the way. What’s your name?”

“Rose.”

“Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!”

He continues up to the roof, wires his device into the relay and detonates it. It’s not until afterwards, when he’s clear of the explosion, that he realises his declaration to Rose about his Title had been coloured ebony.

He’d Named himself The Doctor, and the colours had reflected the trust and truth of his statement.

(He’s The Doctor. And he can finally believe it now.)

-

Despite his easy success at the department store, he can’t find the main transmitter the Nestenes are using. He doesn’t understand how they’ve hidden something so large. He figures his best chance is to retrieve a sample of living plastic – preferably dormant – so he can try to back trace the signal.

A sample like that detached arm, perhaps. A scan indicates it’s still active, so he sets off to try and track it down. It’s probably trying to track him down too; it’s likely the Autons were triggered at the store in response to his poking around.

His search brings him to an apartment unit. It takes him a while to get a fix on the right floor, at which point he drops to his hands and knees and starts scanning the doors one at a time with the sonic. He gets nothing for the effort until he reaches a cat flat. It moves, then flicks open.

He’s startled to meet another pair of eyes.

He leaps to his feet as the door’s swung open. “What are you doing here?”

She scowls at him. He’s preoccupied by his sonic screwdriver, wondering if he’d input the wrong parameters. (Three had been newly regenerated, fighting off lingering perceptions from his previous self as he examined the plastic facsimiles.) He raps on her forehead, double-checking she’s not plastic. As he turns to leave she grabs his arm and hauls him into her flat.

He stares down at her for the handful of heartbeats it takes for her to shut the door. (He can’t help how his gaze is drawn to the gentle blonde of her hair, shining with soft joy.)

The young woman – Rose – fibs to another woman about him being part of an inquiry. He stands awkwardly in the hall while the other woman – her mother, he assumes – states a few facts to him, about her dressing gown and her bedroom.

Oh, he realises, pulling a face. “No.” He moves away immediately, heading deeper into the flat. He accepts Rose’s offer of coffee, moving idly around the living room as she speaks at him from the kitchen, perusing a few of the items lying about. He picks up an envelope. “Rose Tyler.” He’s barely formed a new train of thought when he turns his head to the side.

There’s a mirror on the wall.

He startles, breath catching as a man he doesn’t recognise looks back at him.

(It’s the first time he’s seen his reflection. He’s been successful thus far, avoiding mirrors and other such surfaces. He’s been terrified of who he’d see, of looking at his reflection and seeing a Nameless man looking back at him. But the eyes he meets in the mirror are cerulean blue with grief.)

(A tiny drop of sunglow flickers with his small hope that maybe, maybe, this man in the mirror can live up to the promise of his Title after all.)

He drops the envelope with a soft thump and turns fully to face himself.

(He finds he doesn’t hate the face he wears now.) “Could’ve been worse.” He tries to joke. “But look at the ears.”

Rose is still talking about wanting to go to the police. (The High Council condemn him for meddling, the War Council refuse to heed his warnings.) He knows this would be a futile exercise.

There’s a scuffling, a scuttling, from somewhere in the room. He leans over one of the couches, asking her about a cat, when plastic fingers close around his throat.

Panic jolts him. As he struggles to pull the arm away, his senses are torn between the crisp ivory spikes of pain and the mauve warning bells, both competing for dominance.

Rose enters the room, carrying coffees, but doesn’t think anything’s amiss. He doesn’t blame her, of course, because she’s human. Why would she be expecting danger from something appearing so ordinary? He finally manages to wrench the hand off him, instinctively casting it away from him. Naturally, it then turns on Rose. He leaps forwards, pulling on the arm. He and Rose fall, crashing into the coffee table, and roll across the floor as they both grapple clumsily at the plastic limb.

With the colour clash dissipating, he regains the sense enough to go for his sonic. He attunes it to the frequency the Auton is receiving and cuts off the signal. The limb ceases its movements.

He makes an ‘(h)armless’ joke out loud and she wacks him with the arm. “Ow!” He protests, then laughs. The sound catches him by surprise. Rose smiles at him and he can’t help smiling back, a little amazed. He didn’t know he still remembered how to laugh.

(What right does he have, to smile and laugh, when his life is punishment for the billions who’ve died because of him?)

He scrambles to his feet and flees.

She protests, following him. “Who are you?”

“Told you. The Doctor.” Saying his Name and being able to mean it does make him feel somewhat better.

It shouldn’t feel like a big deal, when Rose goes from trailing after him to walking beside him. It doesn’t make sense that this simple alteration of pace colours everything with (a comforting brown) companionship.

“You can tell me,” she says, as if she’s interested in what he has to say.

“I was just passing through. I’m a long way from home.”

(Gallifrey is gone, dead. But TARDIS bought him to Earth when he’d begged to go home. The Earth has always been more of a home to him. He’ll defend this planet with everything he has, to keep it safe from all forms of war.)

He and Rose banter back and forth. He’s missed this. Talking to someone. He can’t quite wipe the grin off his face.

(He may not have the right, to smile, to laugh, but what other option does he have? If he doesn’t make light of things, he’d drown in the blue waters of his sorrow, his remorse and grief.)

“You’re on your own?”

(He’s expecting her words to be tinted periwinkle, with pity, but they’re not. Instead, they’re pink with compassion. Rose pink, he notes, and wonders if her nature is connected to her name, despite humans not practising this as Time Lords do.)

“Who else is there?” (Everyone else is dead.) “All the time, underneath you, there’s a war going on.” (There’s always a war, but it won’t ever be THE War again. He can manage alone.)

Rose is still listening. So, he keeps talking.

She seems to be processing it all right. She makes a joke about someone taking over Britain’s shops and he’s again surprised by the giggle that bubbles out of him. But the humour turns to ash on his tongue, his mood plummeting again, and he warns her that actually someone wants to destroy the human race. (Her colours become a jumbled mess as she regards him.) When she comes to a stop, he forces himself to keep walking.

(What’s wrong with him?)

She calls after him, asking once again who he is. She’s determined, he’ll give her that. (Her colours coalesce into a pensive shade of azure.) He hesitates, smiles softly. He walks back towards her, talking about the earth revolving.

“I can feel it.” He says, taking her hand. “The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, and the entire planet is hurtling round the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, and I can FEEL it.” (He’s caught up in the intensity of his colours; the chocolate appreciation for his time sense; the warmth of the terracotta wonder for space.) “We’re falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go…” he drops her hand. “That’s who I am.”

Standing beneath the sun, the yellow of her hair is a vibrant promise of joy. Her brown eyes invite closeness, friendship. She has so much to live for, this young woman.

“Now forget me, Rose Tyler. Go home.”

He walks away from her. She doesn’t follow this time.

He reaches the TARDIS, who seems to be radiating sorrow far greater than she has before. He ignores this. Sending Rose away is the right thing to do.

(He won’t be responsible for anyone else’s life again.)

-

He runs a few experiments with the arm, trying to trace the signal back to the origin point. But nothing he does works, and he decides the arm’s too simple. He needs a better, more complex source material. The TARDIS pings up a new reading, one which does seem more sophisticated.

He heads into the restaurant. He’s not very surprised this time to see Rose sitting at one of the tables. But her dining companion is a different matter. He’s an Auton simulacra.

He snags a bottle of champagne and approaches their table.

The Auton, who’d been trying to determine from Rose if their operation has been compromised, starts attacking him. He manages to get the Auton in a headlock and pops off its head. Chaos breaks out. The body chases after him and Rose as they race down a service corridor and out into the alley where the TARDIS is.

Rose is a mess of (purple) fear and (navy) hopelessness. She doesn’t follow him into TARDIS right away, but it’s immediately obvious when she does. He hears the door open, slam. 

(Her flame-orange shock fills the entire console room.)

The door opens and slams again. There’s a long pause. Then it opens and slams once more, as Rose comes back inside.

Once he finishes hooking the plastic head into the scanners, he turns to address her. “Where do you want to start?”

“Um. The inside’s bigger than the outside?” She stalls, then blurts out. “It’s alien.” At his confirmation, she ventures timidly, “are you alien?”

“Yes.” He admits. (Her colours shift, sliding into lilac to reflect her overwhelming uncertainty.) “Is that all right?” Her agreement comes too fast to be sincere. He starts explaining about the TARDIS (and he doesn’t know why he’s bothering to make an effort; it’s not as though she cares about him, and not as though it should bother him what she thinks about him), when she sobs.

“Did they kill him?” She manages, fighting for composure. “Mickey. Did they kill Mickey, is he dead?”

Oh.

(His shame stings green, is swallowed up by a wave of mahogany self-loathing. The ghosts of lost friends, fallen casualties of War, are shaded grey in his memories – detached echoes he wishes he could bring to life again.)

Rose starts shouting at him. (Adric is dead. Tegan is hurting, and she lashes out in her pain.) When he opens his mouth to offer (meaningless) platitudes of comfort, the plastic head starts melting. He swiftly operates the controls, chasing the signal.

(If this Mickey fellow IS dead, he won’t let it be in vain.)

He runs outside, wracking his brain. The Nestenes’ base of operations must be nearby. But Rose is still cross with him about her boyfriend. “You just went and forgot him again!”

“Look, if I did forget some kid” (– there’s death and blood and fire and children, so many children –) “it’s because I’m busy trying to save the life of every stupid ape blundering around on top of this planet, all right?!”

She considers him. (A flicker of soft tan as she summons her patience.) She asks why he sounds like he’s from the north. He retorts that lots of planets have a north (because he doesn’t want to think about the lack of choice involved in his regeneration process, and the exception which has left him more appreciative of this fact). Her next question, about the exterior of the TARDIS is far more comfortable. He’s brimming with pride at the interest in the old girl. (The young man’s name is Jamie, and he stands in front of the TARDIS wondering at the possibility of time and space.)

He goes on to talk about the Nestenes’ ambitions for Earth. “Its food stock was destroyed in the War; all its protein planets rotted.” (He pushes his guilt aside; he’s not culpable for this particular misfortune.) When Rose asks how to stop them, he shows her the vial of antiplastic.

(He doesn’t want to use it. But to protect the Earth, to protect the humans, he will.)

He needs to find the transmitter. “A huge metal circular structure, like a dish, like a wheel. Close to where we’re standing. Must be completely invisible.”

Rose nods to something behind him. He turns back and forth a few times before he makes the connection, comprehending why the London Eye is relevant to their conversation. “Oh.” He beams at her. (He can almost hear the triumphant echo of “Ace” as the pieces fall into place.) “Fantastic!”

He takes off, running down the street. When Rose falls into step with him, he reaches for her hand, like it’s the most natural thing to do. Hand in hand, they make towards the Eye.

-

When he climbs down into the tunnels, she follows him. In a large chamber they find the Nestene Consciousness, a roiling mass of bright colour – the pulsating amber and bold tangerine perfectly captures the interest and amazement the sight invokes.

The weight of the antiplastic in his jacket pocket is jarring. “I’m not here to kill it.” (He’s The Doctor.) “I’ve got to give it a chance.” (Everyone deserves an opportunity to make another choice.)

He asks for an audience and is granted permission to approach. Rose, catching sight of Mickey, races to his side. The young man is clearly shaken, but he’ll be all right.

(He’s glad to see the man is in fact still alive. He doesn’t regret his earlier decision, of not mentioning the possibility of this to Rose. She would’ve been distraught had he been wrong, and she’d have blamed him for her boyfriend’s death, had it been his fault or not.)

His intended negotiation with the Consciousness quickly descends into an argument. The Nestenes find no value in humanity beyond their function as plastic-breeders. “They’re capable of so much more!” (If he didn’t believe this, he wouldn’t have such love for them.) “Please, just go.”

“Doctor!” Rose shouts.

A pair of Autons seize him. The antiplastic is confiscated.

“I wasn’t going to use it!”

(He prefers words to weapons. But no one ever listens to him until it’s too late, then blame him for the dead anyway.)

The Nestenes scream an accusation at him, about collateral.

“What do you mean?” (His apprehension is liquid plum, sticky and staining.) “No!” They have his TARDIS; they intend to destroy her – collateral reparation for collateral damage.

IMPRUDENT! They roar.

(He can be deemed guilty of many things, but imprudence isn’t one of them; he’s long been aware that there’s always consequences.)

“That’s not true!” He cries. “I was there! I fought in the War!” (His fellows, his friends, dying over and over and over again beside him, while he endures – no.) (Outside the War, linear time and space are being torn apart. Eight, scrambling to staunch the wound but unable to stop the infection from spreading, consuming everything in its path.) “It wasn’t my fault!”

They accuse him of favouritism towards Earth, as if he’d had any control over which planets were affected by the Time War.

“I couldn’t save your world, I couldn’t save any of them!”

(Gallifrey was the only planet whose fate he had chosen.)

He twists in the Auton’s grasp but can’t wriggle free. (He’s no Warrior.) Rose and Mickey cower as the Nestenes send out the activation signal for their invasion forces. “Get out, Rose! Just get out! Run!”

(His hearts race, his perception of the room blurring. Heat beats against his face; he’s restrained, helpless. Everyone’s going to die.)

“Time Lord!” The Nestenes hiss venomously.

He tries to focus on the present. He keeps struggling to get free. The vial of antiplastic is mere inches away from him, still being held by the other Auton.

Rose gets to her feet. He turns to her, catches her eye. The flickering ambience of the room bathes her in a saffron light. (A beacon of optimism, in an impossible moment.) Her expression grows determined.

“Just leave him!” He hears Mickey insist, and he finds himself in agreement. But he can’t look away from her.

She runs.

But not away, not to safety. She runs across to the side, hacks at a chain secured to the wall. She rattles off a list of all the things she doesn’t have, then prefaces what she does: Jericho Street Junior School Under Seven’s Gymnastics Team. “I’ve got the bronze,” she declares, her words as proud as the colour itself.

She swings down towards them. He takes advantage of the Auton’s distraction to sling the one holding him into the vat below. Rose knocks into the one holding the vial. The antiplastic plummets, spilling and sinking into the Nestene Consciousness. They bellow as a crackling light (blue-grey and white, submission and death) riddles through them.

“Rose!” He catches her on the downswing. She’s a warm, solid weight in his arms. (When was the last time he’d held someone, who wasn’t in mourning or dying?) He pulls her close, thrilled she’s unharmed.

There’s an explosion, the first of many. He ferries the shaking Mickey inside the TARDIS, tugs at Rose to follow. As they dematerialise, the active scans show the frequency he’d been tracking flatline, the Autons ceasing to function as the Consciousness destabilises.

-

He watches Rose from the doorway of his TARDIS. It’s a life-altering realisation, that he doesn’t want to say goodbye to her.

“You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me,” she teases.

“Yes, I would.” He agrees sincerely. “Thank you.”

Just ask, he thinks. Ask her.

“You could come with me,” he suggests, swallowing back a quiver of (lilac) nerves.

“Don’t!” Mickey protests. (His words shudder with suspicion, streaked teal.) “He’s an alien, he’s a thing!”

(Three avoids most of the soldiers in UNIT. He knows it doesn’t matter how many times he saves them, saves the Earth; he’ll always be an alien first. He stays for The Brigadier, stays because his nature gives him no other choice, because why else would he tolerate the company of colleagues who don’t respect him? If he wanted that, he’d go back to the Academy.)

“He’s NOT invited,” he adds pointedly. “What do you think?”

(The hesitant sunglow of hope he feels is still so new.)

But Rose is indecisive, despite the shimmering iris of longing she emits. “Yeah, I can’t,” she says.

He manages to keep his expression blank, concealing his (mossy) disappointment behind a (sepia) wall of composure. “Okay.” (Why did he expect to receive any other answer?) “See you around.” He swallows, shuts the door.

His hearts are heavy as the TARDIS dematerialises into the vortex.

-

He shouldn’t feel this devastated, over a human he barely knows. And yet, the entire console room feels like it’s clouded over beige with his resignation.

Surely, it’s better this way.

(But his longing is the same shade of iris hers was.)

-

The TARDIS rematerializes in precisely the same spot.

He sticks his head out. “By the way, did I mention it also travels in time?”

Rose’s colours immediately shift from sapphire shards of regret into a luminous expanse of joyous yellow.

He smiles widely, stands back and waits. A few seconds later, she runs into the TARDIS, door closing behind her.

He affects a casual stance. “Right, Rose Tyler, do you want to go backwards or forwards in time?” She picks forwards and he shows off a little, travelling a hundred, then ten thousand years into the future with ease. But he really wants to make an impression, to amaze her, to show her how vast the expanse of time can be. Linear beings tend to measure such concepts by their own standards, against things they view as constants. So he takes them five billion years into her future, to the day the sun expands and destroys the Earth.

“You lot. You spend all your time thinking about dying.” He reflects gently. “But you never take time to imagine the impossible – that maybe you survive.”

(“You live.”)

They watch as the sun flares up.

(He can do this, he thinks. He can witness the natural death of the Earth, paying homage to humanity, that wonderful species who thrives and survives. It’s not going to be a mess of destruction and death. This is about life. There is a beauty to be found here.)

He gives Rose some context for the event, keeping the mood light. The party’s intended to appear as a respectful celebration of the planet. When Rose asks about people living there, he replies “they’ve all gone. No one left.” (This planet is empty. Unlike Gallifrey had been when – no. No, don’t think about that.)

The Steward appears to confront them about their presence but the psychic paper smooths things over pretty quickly. The Steward then moves to call in the other attending guests. There are trees from the Forest of Cheam; the Moxx of Balhoon (who he’s vaguely familiar with); Adherents of the Repeated Mean (who he’s not familiar with); the brothers Hop Pyleen (he’s pretty sure The Corsair once stole the prototype for a hypo-slip travel system from them, but he can’t remember if she sold it or improved it before they got it back); and still more guests coming. He doesn’t pay the procession much mind, more interested in watching Rose’s reactions instead.

The representatives of Cheam approach them, their leader offering him a cutting of her grandfather as a gift of peace.

(He doesn’t know what the colour for peace is.)

He flounders a moment. “I give you in return…air from my lungs.” (The value of peace, life enduring, and himself breathing when everything else is coated in ash – he sweeps these disjointed thoughts aside.) Jade is suitably moved; they exchange flirtatious remarks before she moves on.

The next announcement from the Steward catches his interest.

“From the Silver Devastation, the sponsor of the main event, please welcome The Face of Boe.”

(He’d stood on the edge of the Silver Devastation once, battered and bruised but alive, after the conclusion of the so-called ‘temporal dispute’ against the Pantheon of Discord. He’d been young then, but he still remembers how his exhaustion seemed to lift at the sight of his friend’s grin – still the same despite the new face – and how he’d had such hope that everything would be okay, now the fighting had ended.)

More guests approach him and Rose, so he continues to exchange gifts with them all, until the final guest arrives. The last human, Lady Cassandra O’Brien-dot-Delta-Seventeen. He’s still feeling pretty upbeat about the whole event, so it’s a surprise when he notices colours swirling unexpectedly. Rose, moving to a better vantage point to take in Cassandra’s thin appearance of naught but skin, flickers olive. He reasons to himself that Rose is merely disgusted by the inaccuracies in Cassandra’s speech.

But as the music starts, Rose is enveloped in a lime mist (nauseous, overwhelmed) and flees the room.

His expression drops. (How could he be so stupid, so inconsiderate? He’s such a fool, to think a human could find anything good in an event like this. This was a mistake. She’s never going to want to travel anywhere else with him.) He sets off after her.

“Doctor?” He turns. There’s a flash and the device in Jabe’s hands beeps. “Thank you.”

He suspects he’s just been scanned but he doesn’t care. It’s unlikely the machine will be able to identify him (given the historically revised status of his race) and Rose is more important.

-

He follows Rose’s colour trail, disheartened by the increasingly sour shading of her mood.

The intercom system sounds out. “Would the owner of the blue box in Private Gallery Fifteen please report to the Steward’s office immediately.” This is followed by another announcement, from the computer: ‘Earth death in twenty-five minutes.’

He makes a detour to give the staff instructions on storing the TARDIS safely. (Intellectually, he knows the jittering fandango making his chest tight is his separation anxiety; he needs to know where she is, when she is, to know she isn’t one of those burnt out husks of the ships that died in battle.) Then he enters the viewing gallery, taking a seat on the opposite side of the stairway to Rose. He asks for her thoughts.

“They’re just so alien,” she says, and his smile falters. She notices, tries to clarify. “The aliens are so alien. You look at them, and they’re alien.” This doesn’t make him feel any better. (In his experience, discrimination isn’t really about how someone looks, only about the fact that they’re different.) Rose asks where he’s from, and he evades answering. (His home burned up in the War, and the planet that’s as good as his home is awaiting its natural end as they speak.) She questions their use of language next and he responds to this more willingly, always eager to praise the ingenuity of the TARDIS. “The telepathic field gets inside your brain, translates.” Psychic communication is – was – always a commonplace occurrence amongst Time Lords.

But Rose is human, and he realises too late he should’ve worded that better. “Your machine gets inside my head? It gets inside, and it changes my mind and you didn’t even ask?”

(Humans have always enjoyed perpetuating the trope of evil science fiction. Perhaps that’s why they’re always so reluctant to trust him, and so quick to blame him.)

“What sort of alien are you?” She demands. She presses for an answer about his origins, his planet, (his past,) and the rush of red that overtakes him is sudden and intense.

“This is who I am!” He shouts. “Right here and now, all right? All that counts is here and now and this is me!”

(He is The Doctor. It doesn’t matter who the man before him was. That man is dead and buried. He has to live in the present, for the future, or he’ll be buried by the past too.) 

He gets to his feet, strides down the steps, away from her. He stands there, staring out at the Earth, awash with the light of its dying sun. ‘Earth death in twenty minutes.’ (Maybe the only thing to be found here IS death. Maybe that’s all he’s good for now. If it is, at least he has something in common with Eight.)

Rose approaches him contritely, trying to diffuse the tension between them. As a peace offering, he takes her phone and upgrades it. He watches as she phones her mother, a soft orchid hue about her as they speak. Love is a good look on her.

(He remembers a time when he’d felt overwhelmed, when he’d made a phone call across the expanse of time, seeking reassurance from The Brigadier. He occasionally wonders whether he’s brave enough to leave a message on his phone. Just to reassure his old friend he’s still living.)

The space station judders suddenly. He cocks his head. That’s trouble.

-

He and Rose return to the observation deck. When Jabe approaches, an amber aura indicating her interest, he casually involves her in their conversation, querying if she knows how to get to the engine room. She suggests the maintenance duct. “I could show you and…your wife?”

He clarifies that Rose isn’t his wife. (He’s fairly certain he’s supposed to clarify. Women can be particular about defining relationships correctly; at least, The Rani used to get frustrated when she couldn’t get a clear answer out of him or The Master about what they were to each other. By the time the three of them had left the Academy, she’d stopped bothering to ask.) He continues, clarifying Rose isn’t his partner either. But as he rejects the term concubine, he suddenly becomes aware that Jabe’s (tan) patiently curious as Rose is now (crimson) indignant.

“Whatever I am, it must be invisible,” Rose counters. She suggests they go and ‘pollinate’ while she speaks to Cassandra.

He extends an arm to Jabe, all charm, and they head off. He considers her interest in Rose, remembering the scan she took of him earlier. (Does she suspect Rose is like him?) He distracts her by asking about how the station is run, which is a relevant avenue of questioning anyway. Jabe tells him the computer functions are completely automated and flawless.

“Unsinkable?” Declarations like this are never a good omen. “I was on board another ship once, they said that was unsinkable.” (He was playing chess against a girl who reminded him of a Battle Queen, knowing that Eight, soon to be clinging to an iceberg, was out of his temporal reach.) He turns his thoughts to Jabe herself, asking why she’s attending the event.

“We respect the Earth as family,” she says. “I’m a direct descendant of the tropical rainforest.” She pauses. “And what about your ancestry, Doctor?” He tries to keep his focus on the terminal, on the light emitted by his sonic (the light blue, its calming aura), but her words tremble coral (she’s a little in awe of him) as she admits her scanner refuted his existence. “Even when it named you, I wouldn’t believe it. But it was right.”

(Time Lords have been reduced to myths and legends now, beings in a story from ancient history. Sometimes he feels as much of a ghost as his people are.)

“I just wanted to say…” Jabe remarks quietly. “How sorry I am.” She puts her hand on his arm.

Everything between them is tinged with deeper blues, with sadness and grief. His vision blurs from more than the colour. (He’s crying, he realises.) He covers Jabe’s hand with his own briefly, soaking up her sympathy. Then he gathers himself back together and opens the door to the engine room.

The climate calibration isn’t quite right, he thinks. When he opens the control panel, a metallic spider crawls out and he understands. “Sabotage.” Another announcement for Earth death sounds out; ten minutes now. “And the temperature’s about to rocket.”

-

Someone tampered with the sun filter in the Steward’s office; the man’s been long dead. Another sun filter is rigged to descend. He races to the room in question. Someone’s inside, banging on the door. (He can see the burning white light on the other side, heralding death.)

Rose is inside.

He manages to bypass the controls and the sun filter starts rising again. He’s barely given a moment to breathe when the computer overrides his command and the filter starts descending again. He tears open the control panel and dives into the circuitry, intent on his task. He tries to block out the sound and smell of sizzling metal as the heat scorches it.

(The smell of burning metal, burning flesh. The three of them, on a mission together, caught in an ambush. The Rani, screaming, as an acidic substance blisters her skin, burning her alive. The Master, holding her down as she writhes, burns across half his face, his hair still smoking. Himself, when Not The Doctor, trying to extract the foreign implant syphoning her regeneration energy, his own burns already fading, his body enduring as it was made to. Hours passing before The Rani finally regenerates.)

(The Master, lost to the burning light of the Cruciform. The Rani, BURNING with Gallifrey. Not The Doctor, BURNING, but surviving.)

(He won’t let Rose burn.)

He raises the sun filter again, but the door won’t open from here. He has to find another way to get her out. He sprints down the corridor, barely registering the five minute announcement for Earth death. He enters the observation deck on the tail of Jabe’s explanation to the other guests about the sabotage.

He takes the spider. (He feels cold. There’s a monster plotting to burn everyone to death.) “Let’s send him back to master.”

The Master himself always had a knack for layering plans within plans. So, when the spider implicates the Adherents of the Repeated Mean, he isn’t fooled. “Nice little cover for the real troublemaker.” The Lady Cassandra.

She’s unapologetic as she lays out her plans, finding their blood no price at all to pay to obtain their money. (The blood of the innocent is never an acceptable price to pay, not for money. Nor for peace.)

‘Earth death in three minutes.’

Cassandra is smug. “Burn, baby, burn.”

(Everything is as red as blood and he can’t tell whose hatred is whose.)

There are explosions inside the mainframe, and the safety systems fail.

“At least it will be quick,” Cassandra surmises briskly. (What would she know about BURNING to death?) She teleports out, leaving them all to their fates. (Coward. At least the one who was Not The Doctor remained to BURN along with the people he killed. And he deserved it.)

He has to reset the system manually, it’s the only option. He tells Jabe to follow him, offers a bland reassurance to the other guests as he backs up. In his line of sight are the Moxx, who’s rocking from side to side (skin almost as navy blue as the hopelessness slithering around him), and further back, the Face of Boe. Their eyes meet briefly. He’s struck by other’s reassured shades of ebony and charcoal. (Trust, confidence in him.)

(He won’t fail them.)

-

The heat levels are already critical when he and Jabe make it back into the engine room. A flash of (scarlet) irritation hits him when he sees the switch is on the other side of the room, beyond the turbines. The turbines, which are already spinning faster to try and compensate for the temperature disparity. Jade pulls the lever to slow their cycle, holds it down in place.

No. “The heat’s going to vent through this place.” But when she acknowledges this, her words are as wheat, soft with acceptance. (NO.) “Jabe, you’re made of wood!”

“Then stop wasting time,” she tells him. “Time Lord.”

(She calls him Time Lord, her words shining copper, respectful in a way he’s not heard in so long – not since a lifetime before the War – and he can’t help but smile at her. He will show her the same respect and defer to her colours, her decision.)

He faces the spinning turbines. Even with Jabe anchoring the cycle lever, timing is important. He ducks safely past the first; two more to go. He can’t help but look back at Jabe. She meets his gaze determinedly, unafraid. (He tells himself she’ll be okay but, even though he can’t perceive death the way Eight could, he knows this is a lie.) He ducks between the blades of the second turbine.

As he stands before the final turbine, Jabe starts screaming in pain. He spins around. There’s a clang of metal as the lever resets and there’s a pillar of fire where Jabe was standing.

(He feels them all die. He BURNS with each and every one, with everything. He cannot breathe. It’s his punishment, to survive.)

(He chokes on grey ash – why did she choose to risk herself for him – and he bleeds ivory – pain and anguish.)

He turns back to the turbine. The blades are spinning so fast now they’re just one continuous red-and-greyish blur. (He feels just as detached, drowning in a whirlwind of someone else’s hostility.) It’s impossible to see any opening, any way through. The computer starts counting down. ‘Ten…’

(He knows colours, in this life. But he’s known Time in all of his lives.)

‘Nine…’ He closes his eyes.

He breathes. (He sinks into his sense of The Doctors who came before. Numbers belonged to another self, in another life.)

‘Five…’ He steps forward.

And passes cleanly through the gap between two turbine blades. He runs to the switch and raises the shields.

-

He stands beside the smoking cinders that remain of Jabe. (An innocent, eaten up by the flames of conflict.) (Another life he’s failed to save.) And he feels nothing.

(But the colour that wins out is burgundy.)

-

The first thing he does is speak to Jabe’s fellows. They weep.

Rose asks if he’s all right. (No, he isn’t.)

He reverses the teleportation feed, summoning Cassandra back to the observation deck.

(He feels like he’s BURNING all over again.) “People have died, Cassandra. You murdered them.”

And perhaps he may have tried to find it within himself to be merciful (to give her another chance, to make another choice), but then she says, “it depends on your definition of people.”

(It’s ALL burgundy.)

When she starts creaking, he does nothing. “You raised the temperature.” She made herself into this; she’s done this to herself. (“I am whoever I must be for this,” says the one who is Not The Doctor. “No more.”)

“Have pity!” Cassandra pleads.

“Help her.” Rose entreats quietly.

But he is lost. (Lost to fire and War, lost to battle and blood and anger and revenge.) “Everything has its time, and everything dies.”

(He’d kill himself, kill his predecessor, if he could. But Time has denied him this. His punishment is to live.)

Cassandra’s flesh bursts. She dies in a splatter of red and white.

-

He stands alone, in a dark room which isn’t black enough to make him feel any modicum of safety. He aches.

(Coming here was a mistake. There was nothing to be found here but death.)

-

He finds Rose later, standing in the empty observation deck, watching the broken fragments of Earth drifting across the orange backdrop of the sun. The real surprise is how the sight doesn’t look as destructive as it should. Instead, there IS an ethereal splendour about it after all.

Rose stands out in contrast, a pensive azure. “We were too busy saving ourselves, no one saw it go.”

(The rumours say there was a bright flash when the War ended, with Gallifrey at the heart of it. And then there was nothing left.)

“Come with me.” He takes her hand.

-

They return to the Earth of her present, stepping out onto a street busy with noise and colour. A baby cries and a man laughs, people walk on their way. The sun shines up ahead, golden rays of light glint all around, painting the street with life.

“My planet’s gone,” he confesses to Rose. “It burned like the Earth.” (BURNED, until nothing remained.) Rose asks him what happened. (HE happened.) “There was a War, and we lost.” It’s such an oversimplification, but it’s all he can bear to say. (At least the Daleks didn’t win. At least the universe still exists, time still continues. But he spent the blood of his planet, his people, in exchange and he pays the price for it every day.) “I’m a Time Lord. I’m the last of the Time Lords.” (Isn’t it supposed to help, talking about it? This clumsy attempt isn’t helping; it’s making him feel worse.) “I’m the only survivor.” (He shouldn’t have survived, didn’t deserve too.)

(He’s felt alone before, isolated, one madman ostracised from the rest of his people. But this is a new type of loneliness – distinctions hardly matter if there’s no one left to be compared to. Now, he’s truly alone, in every sense of the word.)

Rose says, “there’s me.”

He wants her to stay. He likes her, likes being around her, likes having her travelling with him. But he likes her, and he wants her to be safe. (And he isn’t safe.) “Do you want to go home?” Does she even like him enough to stay? They’ve been arguing a lot since they met but, given his history of complicated relationships, he can’t always pick what’s banter and what’s bitter. (The Brigadier had to be a firm boss sometimes; forgiveness for Mike’s betrayal remained undecided; and The Master often spoke to both simultaneously.) Though his own sense of colours help, he’s unsure about whether he should be measuring frequency or intensity.

Rose says she doesn’t know. He doesn’t take it personally.

What they do agree on is that they both want chips. And sometimes, it really is as simple as that.

-

He has a go trying to teach Rose how the TARDIS systems work in flight. The old girl is misbehaving, and he can’t remember the last time he’s had such fun.

They land in the 1860s. Rose marvels at time travel. “You can go back and see days that are dead and gone a hundred thousand sunsets ago.”

(He stays with the present, basking in the welcoming browns and yellows of this moment, of their friendship. He does his best to overlook the past, of another Moment, and the sunsets that will never come again.)

“Not a bad life,” he comments, though it’s more of a question.

She smiles warmly at him. “Better with two.”

(There are no words for how important she is to him. But there is a colour: terracotta, because it’s such a wondrous thing.)

He fiddles with some of the systems while Rose changes. When she returns he abruptly straightens, taking in the sight of her in period appropriate attire. (Smooth chocolate, an honest appreciation of her appearance.) “You look beautiful!” He blurts out.

Her modesty is a bright mint and her smile bashful.

She looks even more beautiful, stepping out into the snow. (Her wonder at what she’s doing is as terracotta as his own.) He offers his arm and they stroll into history. It’s such a beautiful night, and he (almost) feels happy.

But trouble always finds him. (Or is it that he always finds trouble? Even after so many years, he’s never quite sure which it is.) Screams ring out.

He races into a theatre, pushing through the frantic crowd, to see a phantom sweeping around the room. The shrieking is unworldly, its ghostly being is shaded a transparent periwinkle. (Is it the wail or the colour that stirs pity in him?)

He questions the man on the stage, who is dismissive of him and mocks his attire. “What’s wrong with this jumper?” He demands. (He’d changed it for this occasion, swapping the burgundy out for an ebony one – trading cruelty for trust. He wants to try, wants to try and take a step in the right direction. He wants to trust that there’s more meaning to his life than the cruelty of his survival, that there can be good too.) He’s trying to make an effort.

The phantom pours itself into the gas lantern.

His attention is diverted though, as Rose is kidnapped. He leaps into the nearest coach, pulling his new acquaintance along. Who turns out to be Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens! “You’re a genius!”

His estimation of Charles increases when the man implores his driver to hasten the chase after Rose’s abductors.

-

A young maid opens the door of the undertaker’s building. His eyes are drawn to the lanterns on the wall behind her, the way the flame is trembling, an amber call for attention. “Having trouble with your gas?”

Rose’s shouts for help are audible from down the hall.

He races inside, kicks open the door that separates them. He pulls Rose from her assailant’s grasp, tucks her safely by his side. He faces the two reanimated corpses. “My name’s The Doctor.” (The amethyst shine of pleasure he gets from being able to rightfully claim his Title is something he’ll never take for granted.)

“We’re dying.” They say, the words echoing with many other voices, aching with desperation. “Help us.” They scream as their gaseous forms stream from the human corpses, drawn back to the lanterns.

-

Mr Sneed is quite distressed, explaining to everyone how their dead continue to get up and walk about.

The maid, Gwyneth, brings him a cup of tea. “Two sugars, sir. Just how you like it.” His eyes follow her, mildly intrigued by the fact she can read him. (Even those strongly practised in their psychic gifts often have trouble with him. Perhaps it’s his colour sense that makes him easier to read than his past selves, or maybe it’s because Gwyneth is so sensitive to the rift energy, and its proximity heightens her gift.)

(Or perhaps the Time War broke something in him that couldn’t be mended with regeneration.)

Charles is adamant the entire incident was an illusion.

His annoyance at this is a very precise shade of scarlet. (The very same scarlet which had clung to Six, the colour more potent than those on his jacket.) “If you’re going to deny it, don’t waste my time, just shut up.” (The Valeyard insults the inability of human minds to conceive reality beyond a one-dimensional concept; Six uneasily wonders if he truly does fault them for their lack of temporal perception.) He doesn’t retract his statement. “What about the gas?”

He’s told that’s new. He goes on to explain about the rift – a weak point in time and space – and that the ‘ghosts’ are coming through this widening gap. (The rift is a strange fracture, one that’s both bound to Time and broken by it. He has strong suspicions its existence was caused by the Time War and has bled back on itself, but he’s too afraid to scrutinise its nature closely enough to confirm this. He can’t bear to be culpable for this too, on top of everything else.) Mr Sneed cites a history of ghost stories going back generations, attached to this house.

But Charles is unconvinced.

(Even frustrated as he often was, Six would never share in The Valeyard’s opinions. And neither does he.)

He apologises for his earlier outburst. “You’ve got one of the best minds in the world.” He talks Charles through the logic of the situation; the decomposing corpses are perfect vessels for creatures made of gas. “There’s just more to learn.”

“I dedicated myself to that – injustices, the great social causes. I hoped that I was a force for good.” (Charles is a better man than he could ever claim or hope to be.) Charles is dismayed his worldview must change so greatly. “Have I wasted my brief span here, Doctor? Has it all been for nothing?”

He considers the weight of Charles’s words. He gives his response very carefully.

“I think everyone haunted by ghosts finds themselves questioning their perspective on life.”

(His life is punishment, but life itself is not.)

-

Gwyneth is in a nervous state about her psychic gifts, which have been growing stronger. “I’ve tried to make sense of it, sir.”

He feels a rush of sympathy for her. This young girl, growing up in a time and place that doesn’t understand her or how special she is.

(They stand in the mess of their failed laboratory experiment, the lecture from Borusa still ringing in their ears. “They just don’t appreciate our genius,” The Master complains. They look at each other and start laughing all over again. At least they’ll always have each other.)

-

He declares they’re going to hold a séance, to try and communicate with the gas phantoms. Charles is resistant to the notion, but eventually relents. They all sit around the table, holding hands. Gwyneth reaches out; he can feel her instinctively adjusting her mental defences, relaxing them. “Speak to us that we may relieve your burden.”

He trusts the strength of her character. (He chose this colour shirt for a reason.) “I have faith in you, Gwyneth.” She drops her mental defences entirely, opening herself up. The phantoms coalesce behind her, and they all speak as one.

“Pity us,” they implore. “Pity the Gelth.”

(Their forms remain transparent, as they’re tethered to the rift, but the colour leaking from them still appears to be periwinkle. And he does pity them.)

“We are so very few. The last of our kind – we face extinction.” He asks them what happened. “The Time War.” Rose looks towards him. He can’t bear to hold her gaze and his eyes flit away again. “The Time War raged, invisible to smaller species, but devastating to higher forms.”

(He knew of the damage being done to the universe long before he made the decision to drink from a chalice and abandon his Name. He couldn’t save them then. Their fate is his responsibility.)

The Gelth are trapped in their gaseous forms, hence their need for the corpses. “We want to stand tall, to feel the sunlight, to live again.”

(He’d made choices, regarding how the War would impact him. No one else had that luxury. How can he not help make amends?)

Rose’s objection to their use of the dead is awkward, uncomfortable. He frowns at her. “It could save their lives.”

As the Gelth withdraw, Gwyneth slumps forward. His hand flies to her back, a gesture of support that echoes of old instincts. (The mind-bending contest was a game all three of them were good at, in their own way. The Master would always give The Rani the worst sort of headaches; he’d rub her back while The Master chuckled at her death threats. Once, he and The Master somehow managed to knock each other out; they clung to each other when they woke, groaning in discomfort, as The Rani laughed at them both.) He slowly retracts his hand.

(He is surrounded by ghosts of the dead and the dying everywhere he looks.)

-

When Gwyneth awakens, her first thoughts are for her angels. She knows they need her, and he agrees.

Rose rounds on him. “I’ve told you, leave her alone.” Her compassion for Gwyneth is clear (she’s flushed pink with it). “She’s exhausted and she’s not fighting your battles.”

He leans his head back against the wall.

(“Your battle is going to be making sure I don’t kill myself while I do this.”)

(They’d fallen into the path of the Dalek fleet responsible for The Master’s pre-War execution purely by chance. That incarnation of The Master had a temper and a need for justice-slash-retribution as all-consuming as The Doctor whose multi-coloured jacket matched the new casing of his tissue compressor.)

(The Master had slaughtered the entire fleet. Then his friend had spent an hour trying to goad him into killing him, up until the point when he’d stopped fighting and told The Master to kill him instead. The Master had screamed and thrown his weapon across the room. He’d had to knock The Master out to stop him from hurting either of them any further.)

(Later, when they’d both calmed down, The Master had merely said “there’s no shame in knowing one’s limits.” It was as close to a ‘thank you’ and an apology The Master’s nature would allow.)

He could try making the bridge himself, but the complexities of his mind (the fractious quality of memories layered with multiple personalities, the temporal residue leftover from the War, the convoluted history of Rule breaking,) would likely hinder more than help. And that’s not taking into account the fact that he’s a Time Lord. He’d rather the Gelth remain unaware of this. He doesn’t want to add insult to injury.

Of course, the last thing he wants is for Gwyneth to risk any more mental discomfort. He sighs. “But she can help.” Gwyneth’s gift resonates on the same frequency as the rift – her bridge would allow the Gelth to cross through effortlessly. (Lost in another realm, there’s no one to help him get home. When he isn’t staring at a lake, haunted by ghosts of his past and a War waging beyond his reach, he tries bridging the gap between a King and a Queen. He knows death, and he sees everyone who is going to die.) Using the dead to give them new life, their species can survive.

But Rose still finds the idea distasteful. “Those bodies were living people. We should respect them, even in death!”

(If he was to die, to regenerate, what would she think of him?)

Defensively, he demands if she carries a donor card. When she falters he points out, “it’s a different morality. Get used to it or go home.”

Humans, always judging him for not conforming to their standards. (The soldiers in UNIT, whispering behind his back. Liz and Mike, his colleagues, his supposed friends, regarding him with disdain.) Aliens are dying, and the humans never care!

(The Brigadier puts his duty first, and he understand this, respects that the man has to be his boss first and his friend second. They argue often about acceptable risk. But when the moment comes for The Brigadier to make a decision – when he stands between UNIT’s weapons and the alien threat – The Brigadier chooses to spare The Master’s life.)

“Don’t I get a say, miss?” Gwyneth interjects quietly. “I know my own mind. And the angels need me.”

(There are some humans who do care.)

-

The rift is weakest in the morgue, so they make their way down there. Rose, still harbouring bias, points out how her history already confirms the plan won’t work. Linear beings, always struggling to comprehend the fourth dimension.

“Time’s in flux, changing every second. Your cosy little world could be rewritten like that.” He snaps his fingers. (He’s a child, being lectured in a classroom about the Rules of Time. He’s an old man, and the Council break the Rules, violating his time stream for their own ends. He's a young man, and his past self is being dissected cell by cell, gene by gene, until the convergence stabilises his timeline. He’s Nameless, and he murders another aspect of himself, whose existence may result from the negligence of a future regeneration, before the amalgamation of his self-hatred kills him first.) He suppresses a shudder. “Nothing is safe. Remember that. Nothing.”

The Gelth appear, their words joyous (but, strangely, uncoloured by anything other than periwinkle). He offers to transport them to a new place to live afterwards. This is the best compromise he can think of: the humans will be comforted if the foreign beings are gone from their lives, and the Gelth won’t be subjected to their prejudice and fear.

Gwyneth stands in position beneath the arch. Lowering her mental barriers once again, she opens herself up to them and establishes the bridge. The collective mental presence of the Gelth reaches for her, their touch firm, applying a slight pressure to the edges of her mind.

(He’s shackled to the chaise, face wet, The Psychiatrist’s fingers twisted in his hair. She’s laughing, unkindly, and The Master’s glaring at her from across the room. He whimpers as she rakes mental fingers across his mind. The Master presses at the edges of The Psychiatrist’s mind, firmly, gauging her strength of will. Then The Master decimates her.)

He frowns.

Gelth pour from Gwyneth, so many of them, more than expected, more than there should be if their race is dying. The ghostly form acting as their collective voice grins and their colours abruptly shift – the pale blue is swallowed up by dark reds and purple (a frenzy, calling for blood and fear); a stark white flares, turns to blazing (warlike) flames.

(The phantoms had never been periwinkle. They’d always been white, their true colour hidden beneath the rift, now revealed.)

“The Gelth will come through in force!” They proclaim. “A few billion; and all of us in need of corpses!”

Newly claimed bodies start to rise. Mr Sneed tries to speak to Gwyneth, but she doesn’t hear him. A corpse seizes Mr Sneed, kills him. The Gelth take him barely a moment later.

(Respect for the dead, Rose had protested. And now his willingness to offer the benefit of the doubt in order to help these aliens is going to be the exception that proves the rule.)

Charles, with an apology on his lips and mottled with fear, flees the room.

He barricades himself and Rose in an alcove, slamming the barred gate shut. The Gelth strain to reach into the space, determined to add more corpses to their legion.

The feeling of betrayal is so overwhelming (a storm of maroon and dark blue, as rage and despair crash over him) he’s almost certain he’ll never know the colour for trust again. “I trusted you! I pitied you!”

But the Gelth have no interest in compassion, only in conquering the Earth for themselves.

“Not while I’m alive,” he snarls, bold as onyx. (He’ll die first.)

“But I can’t die.” Rose trembles, fretful with a sour plum. “Tell me I can’t.”

She trusted him too. And look where he’s led her. “I’m sorry.” Death is death; it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the past, present, or future. “Time isn’t a straight line, it can twist into any shape.”

(There’s a whisper in his memories, three different voices with three different inflections. “Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.” Flashes of displaced perception – he’s asked “where are you now?” – he’s in a dungeon and he’s regarded with dread.)

“It’s all my fault.”

(Everything is all his fault. Everything will always be his fault. And there will never be time enough to list all the things he can be faulted for.)

“It’s not your fault,” Rose says. Her other colours are draining away, being replaced with a resigned beige, and it’s wrong.

If he revealed to the Gelth, now, that he’s a Time Lord, would they settle for his surrender in exchange for humanity to be spared? (“You’re going to die right here,” Cass says fiercely. “Best news all day.”) Or would they merely derive a greater pleasure in his death and destroy humanity regardless?

Rose’s resignation shifts to (a more wholesome, wheat) acceptance. “We’ll go down fighting, yeah?” He agrees. “Together?”

He’d spent aeons fighting, expecting to one day die alongside his friends. (He’d never found The Master’s body. The Rani had watched him walk away.) He can’t help but ponder (wish), after all of Gwyneth’s words about angels and her loved ones, whether he might see his friends again one day. (But Time Lords don’t have an afterlife, not like most humans do. There’s no joyful reuniting with your loved ones. There’s only death, non-existence, with your soul taken by Time to lie beyond the Seal.)

At least he’ll be (dead along) with them.

He and Rose take each other’s hands.

“I’m so glad I met you,” he tells her. With her, there have been so many colours he thought he’d never know again; brown, sunglow and yellow, pink. (Friendship, hope and joy, kindness.) Orchid. (Love.)

“Me too,” she replies.

“Doctor!” Charles calls out, reappearing. “Turn off the flame, turn up the gas!”

Charles Dickens is a genius!

He yanks on the gas line at his side and the increased gas levels immediately pull the Gelth from their host corpses. “Gwyneth!” He aches for her, because she was betrayed too. “They lied! They’re not angels!”

The Gelth have anchored themselves to Gwyneth; she can’t send them back. “But I can hold them.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a box of matches.

He sends Rose and Charles out, asks for the matches. (He should be the one to do it.) But then he realises Gwyneth’s not adorned with white because the Gelth’s bleeding pain into her; the white is her own. She’s been dead since she stepped beneath the arch. Only her will remains, anchored to the Gelth in turn.

(He is unable to taken Omega’s place. “Your will is all that’s left of you.”)

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. He kisses her forehead. “Thank you.”

He runs.

He barely makes it out of the house before it goes up in a fireball. There’s fire at his back (scorching heat, so strong it blisters and melts the flesh of everyone except him), the taste of smoke on the air (he breathes in, it coats the inside of his throat). Were the others caught in it too? (Damon is screaming. Where is Andred?)

He clings to the present, focusing on Rose to try and ground himself. The look she’s giving him almost makes him slide straight into another memory. (Adric is dead, Nyssa and Tegan look to him for resolution, struggling to understand that there’s nothing he could’ve done.) He has nothing for her but worthless apologies.

Rose doesn’t understand how Gwyneth’s persona could’ve lingered after the death of her body.

“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Charles quotes. “Even for you, Doctor.”

He turns back to look at the flames and thinks about the dead.

(Nyssa grieves for her father. He tells her Tremas is dead, because it’s kinder, because it’s the truth. But sometimes, he wonders whether The Master still thinks of her as a daughter, whether Nyssa still sees echoes of her father’s smile.)

-

“I wanted to save them.” His words are an exhausted midnight blue. “I wanted to help.” 

“It wasn’t your fault, Doctor.” Charles says gently, and Rose agrees.

(They may believe that, but he doesn’t.)

-

Charles declares he wants to be with his family for Christmas, to make amends to them. He smiles, hearts aching in a good way. (He’s glad Charles has the opportunity to do so.) Charles is brimming with a new outlook on life. “All these huge and wonderful notions. I’m inspired.”

He bids farewell to Charles, as does Rose – catching both of them off guard when she kisses his cheek. (Six and Two huff in surprise as Jamie kisses Peri’s cheek.) When Charles asks him to explain the final mystery – “who are you?” – he thinks about his answer.

“Just a friend, passing through.”

Charles asks another question, this one of the future, (this one brushed with lavender anticipation). “My books, Doctor…do they last?”

“Forever,” he confirms, and wholeheartedly means it in every sense of the word.

(He wonders what sort of story his own will turn out to be; as The Doctor, but also as Nine. Will he be remembered as a friend, just passing through, trying to help? Or will his efforts to make amends be forever lost, rendered worthless because of the one who broke the promise?)

He believes that, regardless of how little time Charles may have left, his life has not and will not be wasted. He brushes his fingers against his chest, his ebony jumper. Despite everything, it seems he does still know the value (and colour) of trust.

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -
> 
> Great appreciation to Christopher Eccleston, who did a fantastic job at returning The Doctor to our screens in 2005. (And a big cheer for Jodie Whittaker, who made her excellent debut this week in 2018! May we continue sharing The Doctor’s adventures for at least another fifty years!)
> 
> Some dialogue, text and information taken from Doctor Who episodes including; Rose; The End of the World; The Unquiet Dead; as well as a plethora of Classic Who episodes; and others are referenced because I am a Doctor Who sponge. 
> 
> -


	2. Ashes from a Time aflame (Nine)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -
> 
> I’ve been waiting to write ‘Dalek’ since Nine first regenerated.
> 
> -

-32-

Jackie Tyler hates him, and she’s right to do so.

(He tries not to think about children who have been lost, or about loved ones who have perished. But he can’t not think about his desperate and ultimately unsuccessful search for The Master’s body; Jackie hadn’t even had that option to try and obtain closure.)

He stays quiet as she screams at him, is contrite when the police officer arrives to question him and Rose. He feels even worse when Jackie starts on Rose, who’s entirely blameless. She attempts to explain, but what can she say? Sorry, my friend is an alien and we’ve been travelling in the fourth dimension and – ironically – the Time Lord got the timing wrong?

(This is probably the worst miscalculation he’s ever made in piloting the TARDIS, and that includes the time he accidently materialised around The Master’s TARDIS.)

“Is this a sexual relationship?” The officer asks.

“No!”

He squirms awkwardly, longing for (a turquoise blanket of) privacy. (He has nothing against sexual relations in general, but he’s never been comfortable with people asking questions about relations involving him.)

Jackie rounds on him. Enough people have hurled accusations at him over the years that most of what she says is more of the same, but then – “pretend you’re a doctor?”

The earnest response tumbles from him before he can stop it. “I AM a Doctor!”

(He is. He is.)

Jackie slaps him.

(Two moments from the past overlay across the present simultaneously: The Rani, pretending to be Mel, disregarding the effort he’s put into making himself into the man he is now; as he remembers The Rani, covered in ooze, standing in the midst of the ruin he’s made of her lab and her life.)

It hurts.

-

He leaves mother and daughter alone after the officer departs, going up to the roof. It’s daytime, but he stares up at the sky anyway, trying to see the stars beyond.

(Once, when Victoria was mourning the loss of her father, he’d told her the memories wouldn’t always be sad ones. She’d doubted this, suspecting he was too ancient to understand. He’s even older now, and fears he’ll never be able to untangle the memories of his loved ones from the trauma the Time War has left him with.)

Rose eventually joins him. “She’s never going to forgive me.” (But it’s HIM that Jackie won’t forgive, and she’s entitled to this.) “You’re so useless.” Even though the words are without heat, they still sting.

“I don’t do families,” he says. (He can’t. Not again.) His face doesn’t hurt anymore, but the hue of Jackie’s contempt still lingers. “Nine hundred years of time and space, and I’ve never been slapped by someone’s mother.” He touches his cheek, trying to dispel the viridian shade she’d hit him with.

“You’re nine hundred years old?”

He says he is, even though from a linear standpoint this isn’t truly accurate (even without taking the aeons of the Time War into account). He gets asked about his age often, so he may as well pick a number and nine hundred seems fitting. He’s The Ninth Doctor; which allocates one century for each Doctor up to now (as opposed to each incarnation, because he’s not counting the man before him who was without a Name). And who knows, maybe he’ll even live to be about…twelve-hundred and something…

(“They’re you,” a voice that sounds like Rose whispers in his memory, and counts; Nine, Ten, Eleven –)

A spaceship, bellowing smoke and engines rattling, comes careening across the sky overheard. It’s angle of descent indicates a textbook crash landing, even though it does go through Big Ben before ending up in the Thames.

He laughs, amused, amazed, (fireworks of marigold and tangerine,) and suddenly he doesn’t feel as old as he is.

-

They can’t get close enough to see what’s happening. Rose suggests using the TARDIS, but he’s cautious about drawing attention to the old girl – he can see the soldiers on the street, their maroon berets drawing his eye.

(Maroon is an apt colour for his past experiences with the soldiers in UNIT; he’s been subjected to their rage on multiple occasions, across multiple lives. Two had been too amateurish; Three too clever; Four too alien; Six too abrasive; and Seven too cryptic. What would they make of HIM? And would they stay their weapons without The Brigadier to vouch for him?)

He’s relegated to watching news updates on the television in Rose’s living room.

A body is found amongst the wreckage. There’s no information about whether it’s alive or dead.

(What would be worse, he wonders; to be found dead; to be found alive only to be killed shortly thereafter; or to be found alive only to be imprisoned and tortured. He doubts there are any other ways for this scenario to end. Humans rarely give aliens the benefit of the doubt.)

(But he can’t help but always hope for something better.)

-

Rose catches him as he leaves the flat. “Promise you won’t disappear?” Acting like it’s not a big deal, he gives her a key for the TARDIS. (But to him, it IS a big deal. To acknowledge she has a permanent place in the TARDIS is to admit she’s become a permanent piece of his life.)

He takes the TARDIS to the hospital where the alien’s being held. He whispers soothing words to the old girl as he sets the controls, encouraging her to be quiet and safe. (He doesn’t blame her for the earlier mishap; she has scars and trauma of her own.) It takes her some time, the equivalent of taking a very slow and deliberate step over a wide crevice, but she makes it. “You’re fantastic,” he says.

When he touches the screen on the console, the display turns the colour orchid beneath his fingers. Whether it’s his love for her or hers for him, it’s beautiful.

He comes out of the storage cupboard into a room full of UNIT soldiers. (He freezes, caught in tight cream ropes, in expectation of what will happen.) They immediately reach for their guns and point them at him. (He struggles to free himself of those expectations, struggles not to disassociate; to keep the platinum creeping around the edges of the cream at bay, lest it overwhelm him.)

A scream cuts through the air.

The woman he finds in the lab is remarkably professional – her (orange) surprise at the alien’s sudden revival is already being suppressed by a vigilance (as jet black as his jacket). He feels a sudden solidarity towards her (a chestnut admiration) and his eyes flicker to her name badge as he reaches for her hands: Doctor Sato.

(He’s struck with an impression of iris: she isn’t a doctor, but she associates the designation with longing. Part of it is her own. But there’s something else there, clinging about her, which prickles oddly at his time sense. It’s an overlay; exposure to someone she’s been near recently, sort of similar to when you stand in an elevator with someone wearing a heavy cologne and the scent lingers on you afterwards. He wonders if the aliens involved have a rudimentary temporal sense, for him to detect their colours on another.)

He’s distracted by a noise from elsewhere within the room.

The alien – which resembles an earth pig – startles when it sees him and takes off running. He races after it, concerned at the thick streaks of purple flooding out in its wake: it’s terrified.

A gunshot rings out and there’s a thump.

He rounds the corner, already knowing what he’s going to find.

(He tastes bright vermillion.) “It was scared!” Through the haze of his aggression, he sees the soldier who’d pulled the trigger is (a mix of lilac and flame-orange) in bewildered shock, but he doesn’t spare any time to coddle the man. He crouches beside the slowly-becoming-corpse, his own colours slipping into an aching (midnight blue) weariness. “It was scared.”

(Why does he bother to continue to hope that aliens could be treated with anything other than violence by humans?)

He traces gentle fingers against the poor creature’s face, its colours slowly ebbing out to white as it succumbs to death.

-

He and Sato are left alone to revaluate the autopsy. She gives him a long, searching look before telling him what she’d found in her earlier examination, and in turn he tells her what he’s realised after having a closer look at the creature. “Someone’s taken a pig, opened up its brain, stuck bits on, then they’ve strapped it in that ship and made it dive-bomb.”

(The side of The War Chief’s TARDIS is torn open and they all scream, clinging to the console as the gravity dampeners fail. The ship continues to plunge through the atmosphere, towards the ravaged surface below. The Corsair loses her grip and is tossed out into the abyss.)

“But the technology augmenting its brain is like nothing on Earth,” Sato says.

No, indeed.

His suspicion that there’s more to this incident throbs with increasing shades of teal.

-

He’s barely returned, when Rose, her mother, and her boyfriend descend on him.

“You ruined my life, Doctor.” Mickey’s emotions are a kaleidoscope of indignation, jealously, and a sharp boldness (crimson, emerald, and onyx). “I bet you don’t even remember my name!”

Names are important. Lifetimes ago, when he’d had a companion foisted on him (and he was unsure about whether to accept her for her potential or reject her for her prejudices), he’d used the way he addressed her as a test. The use of her name became the crux of determining their relationship.

He lies. “Ricky.”

“It’s Mickey.” He’s as offended as a Time Lord would be, which is surprisingly endearing.

(Romana had grown into her potential, accepting and owning the shortened address. Mickey will either push to earn his own name back or settle for the bias that lies between them.)

Mickey makes a snide comment about why invading aliens would put the world on alert – the young man’s not nearly as idiotic as first impressions lead others to believe. Even so, he continues being standoffish, dismissing Mickey when he tries once again to engage in conversation.

(He misses Romana fiercely. It’s only worsened by the constant reminder that she too BURNED to death, because of him.)

The scanners reveal the alien spaceship was launched from Earth.

Mickey, trying to prove he has something to contribute, then makes a jab of his own: “there’s his name, followed by a list of the dead.”

(He’s not wrong. The truth of this will never stop hurting, but he’s determined to save as many lives as he can, even if it can never make up for the ones he can’t.)

He steps out of the TARDIS into a spotlight. There’s sirens and soldiers and suddenly he’s surrounded. Jackie shouts for her daughter, before she’s pulled back by officers. Mickey flees, to find refuge.

(He doesn’t really know or like either of them, so why does he feel betrayed?)

Rose stays with him.

(Her show of unity is a comforting brown.)

-

They’re taken to Downing Street, where a number of alien experts are being gathered. He’s never been treated like someone valuable by the authorities before, not like this. He wants to be pleased, but something itches. (Teal suspicions crawl uneasily across him.) Especially when he has to leave Rose outside and go into the briefing alone.

“If aliens fake an alien crash and an alien pilot, what do they get?” And the moment he asks, the answer dawns with a cloying lavender. “Us.” He anticipates the springing of a trap.

The aliens reveal themselves, one of them shedding their false human skin. “We are the Slitheen.” Their (near-lime) green forms corresponds with his increasingly ill feeling. The other experts are electrocuted, but he’s not human. He staggers back (trying to breathe around the pain) then races out of the room to fetch the soldiers stationed in the building.

(Sometimes, when he gets hurt, when he feels pain, he’s glad. The reminder that his pain tolerance isn’t as high as it was before also reminds him that the one before is dead, and he’s alive. He knows this isn’t healthy; he’s too ashamed to confide this in Rose. But he doesn’t know how to stop the association, doesn’t know if he can.)

But by the time he leads the soldiers back, the Slitheen has redonned its human disguise and accuses him of murdering everyone. (Humans, always so quick to shun those who seem different; soldiers, always so ready to attack an enemy. Finding himself being chased, followed by eyes filled with hate. Nothing ever changes.) He shakes off his pursuers and finds Rose along with a Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North.

A standoff occurs. He demands answers from the Slitheen, managing to worm out of them that they’re a family, here for business, to make a profit, before they cotton on to the fact he’s bluffing. He seals himself and his two companions in the Cabinet Room and tries to work out what to do next.

-

He takes a moment to grieve the secretary’s death. The lad had been so professional when speaking to him earlier on, sticking firmly to his duty even when the world went mad around him. (Just like when he’d first met a young Corporal Benton.) He regrets not knowing the young man’s name.

Speaking of names, he’s not sure why the name Harriet Jones seems to resonate with him, but he’s sure it’ll come to him eventually. He turns his attention to her words, about the UN having the nuclear release codes, which only increases his misgivings.

Rose gets a text from Mickey: a photo of a Slitheen.

“Mickey the idiot,” he declares. “I need you.”

He talks Mickey through gaining entry to the UNIT website, using the Buffalo override The Brigadier had entrusted him with lifetimes ago. Jackie cuts in with questions he really doesn’t want to answer.

“Is my daughter safe?” (No, she isn’t.) “Can you promise me that?” (No, he can’t.)

But then there’s another problem – the Slitheen hunting Jackie and Mickey has found them.

He feels helpless (even more so because he’s listening to their panic and fear without being able to see their colours), but this isn’t the War. He’s not going to let them down.

(The fandango that descends on him is welcome; he works well under stress.)

He concentrates, trying to narrow down the information about these aliens to identify their species. (Would Four, who’d been the essence of knowledge, have known instantly?) He pushes and pushes, trying to shut out the noise and the colour around him, searching for the answer. And finally, he finds it. “Raxacoricofallapatorius!” He beams, ecstatic. (Perhaps Four would’ve been proud. Perhaps Four would’ve deemed him worthy of being The Doctor.)

He tells Mickey to use vinegar. There’s a muted explosion, signalling those two ridiculous humans are safe. He sighs in relief.

(But there’s a piece of him that pities the Slitheen family, just a little. He knows their race share a connection; all of the Slitheen would have felt their brother die. He knows exactly how it feels, to share another’s death but survive it, and he wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone.)

Mickey then feeds them the audio of the Slitheen’s televised speech, asking for the nuclear codes. (His sympathy for them abruptly vanishes.) He opens the Cabinet Room to confront them; the one called Margaret smiles at him. “Profit,” he snarls. “At the cost of five billion lives.”

“Bargain,” Margaret says. The word is under strung with a curl of (amethyst) pleasure which betrays her pretence at an airy, (silvery) business-like hauteur.

He’s going to stop them. (But the aching void the loss of The Master and The Rani have left with him gives him pause.) He gives Margaret a choice, a single opportunity to leave. (Compassion is pink, is Rose, and he has to offer Margaret this chance to spare herself and her family.)

The Slitheen laugh at him, having made their choice. As the panels slide shut again Margaret’s smile leaves her face.

-

He knows what he needs to do.

(He’s lost in a grey fog, feeling so disconnected from himself that his sense of self-loathing and general lack of self-preservation are flat and muted.)

“Because I can’t guarantee your daughter will be safe,” he tells Jackie.

(Rose trusts him: the reality of her ebony stuns him rather than grounds him.)

But this is his life. “It’s just standing up and making a decision, because nobody one else will.”

(How can he trust himself when there’s so much at stake?)

“I could save the world but lose you.”

(Her brown eyes are pools of friendship and he can almost believe he deserves it. He wants to stay and immerse himself in this affection forever.)

Everything seems to come back into focus when Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North, speaks. Firmly, composed. (Her manner and words are glossed with sepia.) “Except it’s not your decision, Doctor. It’s mine.”

At his instruction, Mickey fires a missile straight at Downing Street, straight at them. He takes a moment to watch Rose and Harriet. (Unbidden, he thinks of Adric, of how he failed him.) The three of them crowd into the small cupboard, hoping they can ride the impact out.

(He’s scared. He wants to speak with The Brigadier; the man has always had a knack for making him feel safe. He wonders if, wherever his friend is right now, he’s watching the missile track across a screen and is thinking of him.)

He holds tight to their hands.

Impact. Everything shakes.

The world becomes a jumble of amber, flame-orange, ivory (attention grabbing, shock and pain). He’s thrown head over heels. The sound – there’s a roaring in his ears (– the sizzle of weapons fire) – an explosion – it’s close, too close – heat everywhere (– blood, coating the ground, dripping into his eyes) – crying and screaming – his friends, mustn’t lose them (– a violent burst of regeneration energy – the triumphant screech of a Dalek) – he can smell smoke, taste ash –

Everything shudders to a halt, except his pulse. He tears his way out of the debris. His hands are empty, (his vision stained purple with terror), where is –

“Doctor?”

Rose catches his hand, squeezes. He pulls her close, trying not to break down. Harriet is also relatively unharmed. He tries to get his shaking under control.

(He keeps wanting to reach for someone else who isn’t there.)

He watches Harriet speak to a soldier. When she says the words “prime minister” a sudden temporal clarity hits him, as though his time sense is realigning.

“Harriet Jones. Future prime minister. Elected for three successive terms. The architect of Britain’s Golden Age.”

(He can almost hear The Master’s laugh echo in his ears.)

He smiles.

-

He makes a phone call to a secure line in Peru. It goes to voicemail, which he expected. “Hello, old chap. Yes, that missile which hit Downing Street was me. Sorry about the mess. Oh, and I’m still alive.” He pauses. Repeats, much more sedately, “I’m still alive.”

He calls Rose next and balks at the invitation to stay for tea with her mother. Jackie wants to hate him, he’s not going to force her to make nice with him.

(And he really can’t bear to try and be part of a family again.)

He finds Mickey waiting patiently to speak with him. He’s actually quite touched by Mickey’s disbelief that the world has decided to dismiss the possibility the invasion was real. “You’re just not ready.” The human race prefers maintaining ignorance to admitting any faults with the worldview that suits them.

He considers Mickey. (‘That’s my friend, Romana,’ he says; they find respect for each other more quickly than they expect to, and friendship sneaks up on them in much the same way.) He invites Mickey to join them. (Sometimes, all you need is someone to offer you the opportunity.) But Mickey declines, reasoning it would be too much for him.

When you decide you ARE ready, he thinks, let me know.

Jackie side-eyes him, judgement in her eyes. (She exudes disapproval, the moss colour as dense as its namesake.) He knows she doubts he can handle the responsibility of keeping Rose safe.

If anything does happen to her, I WILL return to face you, he promises silently. Because facing the consequences when you fail someone is part of those responsibilities.

-

While it’s not unusual for the TARDIS to detect and chase distress signals, something about this one is different. The old girl seems to take exception to it, deterred, as a dog pulling back against its lead. (He’s unsure whether it’s because she’s grumpy or wary.) In the conflict of the TARDIS trying to both pinpoint it and shun it, three of the sub-processors blow out and one deletes itself completely. In the end, she relents to the signal drawing them off course.

She lands quite close to the source of the signal but materialises extremely slowly, akin to the way one would incrementally lower themselves into a hot bath to avoid boiling.

(The TARDIS is anxious, he realises.)

“Hey,” he murmurs, stroking the console. “You’re alright.”

(He doesn’t know what’s wrong, but he won’t let anything happen to her.)

Stepping out of the TARDIS, he and Rose find themselves in an underground museum full of alien paraphernalia. He’s a little disconcerted; everything seems a bit clinical, more possessive than proud, which never bodes well for a collection.

He stares at an exhibit of a Cyberman’s head, as silver and impartial in death as it would’ve been in life. The expressionless face seems to stare back, searching for weaknesses to exploit. (“You have affection for this woman?”) The Cybermen are blind to their own flaws, the faults that lie within their greyscale perspective. (“And you do not consider friendship a weakness?”) Emotions are a spectrum of colour; they can be difficult, but they are not weakness.

Somewhere in this museum is a living alien, probably being treated like another exhibit. “Something’s reaching out, calling for help.”

An alarm sounds.

They’re bought before the man in charge. He demonstrates how to operate the alien technology, reasoning that the man’s reaction to a delicate and beautiful musical instrument will tell him exactly what sort of man he is.

(Two cannot find his recorder; Three is born into silence, but offers to buy him a hundred, a thousand, because he understands.)

After the man successfully plays instrument, he tosses it aside like worthless trash.

(This is a man who prefers form over function; so long as the form is judged by impressiveness, not aesthetics, and unless the function is powerful, rather than pleasurable. This is a man who defines value as price, not worth.)

Mr Henry Van Statten says the Cage contains his one living specimen. “Doctor-With-No-Name, come and see my pet.”

(Doctor IS his Name.)

He doesn’t like this man at all.

-

He’s escorted to the Cage. Van Statten explains to him the ‘creature’ is shielded. They’ve called it the ‘Metaltron’ for lack of knowing its real name, and the last person to touch it burst into flames.

He’s sent into a dark room and the door’s sealed behind him. Despite the blackness of the room, he doesn’t feel safe. (He heeds a mauve sense for caution.) There are implements on a table; they’ve been torturing this alien. He aches with phantom pain.

A small, blue light shines from within the darkness.

(Such a shade of blue should convey serenity, but this one’s backlit with white. This blue-white tint seems to hold a contentment for death instead. It’s unsettling.)

He addresses the alien first with an apology. (He knows what it’s like, to be held prisoner, to be hurt simply for being who and what you are.) “I’ve come to help. I’m The Doctor.”

The blue-white light seems to fix on him. Then two points of stark white light flash, synchronised with the harsh, metallic voice which answers him. “…Doctor?”

No, he thinks numbly. Impossible. It’s NOT possible.

“THE Doctor?!”

Lights kick in, illuminating the room and the creature chained before him.

“Exterminate!” The Dalek cries, in a maddened frenzy. “Exterminate!”

Panic seizes him, he’s swallowed up by fear. (He’s going to die, with only the taste of purple being left behind.) He hurls himself at the door, screaming to be let out. (There’s a Dalek, he has no weapons – this isn’t a warzone; he’s no Warrior; he isn’t Not The Doctor! He’s going to die, he’s going to regenerate, he’s going to DIE!)

“You are an enemy of the Daleks! You must be destroyed!”

He shrinks back, away from the door, flattens himself against the wall. Eyes wide and terrified, he stares death in the face, awaits the white that will come with it.

(There’s a fleeting thought for who his next self will be. The Dalek won’t stop with his death; it will exterminate every self that follows. There had been versions of The Master who lived no longer than a second, who never got the chance to call themselves The Master. He wants to live, wants to be The Doctor; he wants the selves that follow to be The Doctor too. He never wants to be Nameless again!)

But though the Dalek twitches, brandishing its gun intently, it doesn’t fire. It takes him several heart-stopping moments to realise it CANNOT fire.

The laugh that’s torn from him is ugly. “Fantastic!”

(Magenta descends on him, the weight of it as tangible as a cape. Its recklessness folds around him, clings to him. He can’t shake it and doesn’t care to.)

When he takes an aggressive step forward, the Dalek jerks away. “Keep back!” It fears him. (It should. There’s a reason they call him the Oncoming Storm.) He gets right up close, staring down its eyestalk. (The Dalek is the one consumed by purple now, instead of him.) It tracks him as he paces.

“If you can’t kill, then what are you good for, Dalek?”

The Dalek is waiting for orders.

“Your race is dead. You all BURNED, all of you. Ten million ships on fire.” (A sickening satisfaction BURNS through his chest; amethyst streaked with burgundy cruelty.) “I watched it happen. I MADE it happen.” (A button beneath his palm. He unleashes The Moment, the BURNING. The Dalek fleet is the first to go. A billion billion Daleks, BURNING.)

“You destroyed us?”

(Dark blue crashes into him and he can’t fight it, it catches and pulls him, a riptide of despair.) He turns away, stares at nothing. “I had no choice.”

“And what of the Time Lords?”

(He BURNS with each and every one of them, with everything. Everyone died. Everyone lost.)

The Dalek calls him a coward.

(Oh, how he wishes he had been. But, no. He’d been a Warrior instead.)

He mocks the Dalek’s signal for help. (If he’d felt pity earlier, he can’t recall it anymore.) The Dalek says they’re the same – because they’re both alone – and something in him cracks.

“We’re not the same! I’m not –” He’s not like them. Dalek’s don’t feel remorse or grief. (They aren’t haunted by the ghosts they make.) Dalek’s kill because that’s what they want, what they need. “No, wait.” An idea strikes. The reasoning for it is rash (influenced by magenta cape still wrapped around him), but why not give the Dalek what it needs? “I know what you deserve.” The white in the centre of its eye demands one thing. “Exterminate.”

He pulls the switch. Watches as the Dalek is wracked with bolts of hot white lightning. Hues of periwinkle flit around the edges as the Dalek screams for pity.

Have pity? “Why should I?” (The bright red of his anger sprays out everywhere, like arterial blood from an open wound.) “You never did!”

Security drag him from the room. He begs them to destroy it.

(He isn’t strong enough to survive another war. And Daleks consider his very existence to be a declaration of war.)

-

He starts talking before realising he’s doing so, telling Van Statten what the Dalek’s are in the hope it’ll make him understand. “Every single emotion was removed except hate.” (Even a Dalek’s fear and pain have foundations in hatred.) Van Statten asks about their creator. (The first Dalek immediately shows a natural desire to exterminate other beings and Davros is proud of his creations.) “You’d like him.”

It’s hard to think. (The Dalek knows he’s here. It’s going to hunt him down, it won’t stop until he’s dead, until everyone’s dead.) He shifts uneasily. (His magenta cape shifts with him.) He doesn’t have time to think; he needs to do something, anything, before it’s too late.

Diane tells him the Dalek fell from the sky, BURNING and screaming in its crater for days.

“It must have fallen through Time.” (He wonders when in the War this Dalek came from, and how – no, he doesn’t want to know.) Diane prompts him for details; he latches onto the distraction, giving a simplified summary of the Time War.

“But you survived too.”

“Not by choice.”

(He’d had no intention of surviving. But survive he did. Some days he wonders why he bothers trying to live with it. But having Rose in his life, she helps.)

It’s only when Van Statten points out the Dalek isn’t the only alien here, that he figures out what’s happening.

(The panic attack hits him so hard his vision goes grey, he’s detached from everything else that exists. Everything except the magenta recklessness that still clings tight to him.)

He doesn’t fight the hands on him. (He wants to, he wants to so badly. But if he lashes out, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to stop. He doesn’t want to hurt them.) They string him up, his wrists chained. White lights are trained on him. (As stark as when the Dalek had spoken to him.) He bites his lip. He doesn’t break the skin, but he can taste the scent of blood anyway. (He blinks, and the room is full of corpses, the walls and floors stained with blood as dark red as the hatred of the Daleks responsible. He blinks again, the memory fades.)

They scan him. It’s invasive. He writhes in agony, tries to get air into his lungs. (The lights turn red, but he’s too overwhelmed to feel angry.) His hearts hammer so hard he fears they’re going to burst out of his chest.

Van Statten is a scavenger. He picks and peels things apart to get he wants and discards the waste. What will this man do, if he discovers the Time Lord ability to regenerate? (Two is strapped down by those who want the secrets of Time. “What are you going to do? Cut me up piece by piece?”) If he regenerates, who will he become? (A Doctor or…someone else?)

“Do you know what a Dalek is, Van Statten?” (It’s a blue-white contentment for death. It’s a blood-red hatred for life.) “A Dalek is honest.” (It’s a vow to exterminate.) “That thing downstairs is going to kill every last one of us!”

Van Statten is unimpressed. “Nothing can escape the Cage.”

The scan resumes. He screams.

-

He’s restrained, and hurt, and confused. The world around him is ash.

(He’s captured. The Dalek Emperor imprisons him. Pain is all that there is.) Ivory bites into his limbs, a thousand pins and needles. (His head’s full of murderous screams, and explosions. But no one’s coming to rescue him this time.)

(“Keep your peace, Doctor;” Davros howls, “you shall have it in death!” But he doesn’t know what the colour for peace is.) He can’t die here. (How can he bow before The Mistress of his fate when she’s dead?)

He doesn’t know where the TARDIS is. (He wants her, wants to be away from here, wants to go home. Where is she? Where is his TARDIS?) He won’t let them have the TARDIS. He won’t let them hurt Rose. (Rose!) He doesn’t know where Rose is either.

(The Nightmare Child is made of madness and fear. It’s sated by his presence. “You are your own Nightmare,” it whispers. What does this say about him?)

This is torture. He’d beg them to stop if he thought they’d listen.

-

An alarm goes off, a panicky voice declaring a ‘condition red’ over the intercom system.

Colour comes back into focus. But it’s not red that hits him first; his resignation at the inevitable is beige.

“Release me if you want to live.”

-

The Dalek escapes the Cage.

The security officers shoot at it, with no effect, and the Dalek slaughters its way through them with ease.

(His ears ring with the sound of gunfire, of extermination rays, of the screams of the dying.)

“They’re dispensable!” Van Statten decrees, still wanting to preserve his precious empire.

(Forget Davros. Van Statten would’ve preferred Rassilon.)

Silence falls. Everyone’s dead.

-

He knows that the longer this goes on, the more chance there is of him doing something rash. (The magenta cape hasn’t loosened its hold on him.) He doesn’t know what to do.

Please, he thinks at Rose. Please, run. (Please be safe.)

Van Statten’s beginning to comprehend how dire the situation really is, but he still thinks he’s in control, is still deluded enough to think he can negotiate with a Dalek. “Everything needs something.”

Daleks do not negotiate. They exterminate.

“If the Dalek gets out it’ll murder every living creature, that’s all it needs.” A shiver of midnight blue runs down his spine. He’s tired of having to reiterate this point. “Because it honestly believes they should die.”

(He’s drowning in midnight blue, it’s in his lungs, in every breath he takes. He’s tired, tired of everything.)

The next stand is made not just by security but all the base personnel in that vicinity. Regardless of the fact he’s viewing it on a monitor, he knows the only colour in the air of that room is white.

The Dalek kills the entire room within seconds.

-

(Dalek. War. Death. Extermination. Regeneration. Pain. Bodies. Screaming. Dying. Dying, dying, dying, dying, dying, dying, dying, dying. BURNING. Destruction. Devastation. Loss. Nothingness.)

-

The Dalek demands to speak to him. “I shall follow the Primary Order – the Dalek instinct to destroy, to conquer!” This is all it knows to do.

Something ugly unfurls in his chest. “If you want orders, follow this one. Kill yourself.” (He feels stained mahogany, with his own self-loathing, and his loathing for the Daleks.) “Why don’t you just die?!”

A pause as the Dalek assesses. Then, “you would make a good Dalek.”

His entire being revolts, churning up lime until he feels like he’s going to be sick.

(The rumoured Cult of Skaro was said to have contained a Dalek modelled after him. If it had indeed existed, he hopes it BURNED a billion times over. He hopes it died screaming and hating him.)

-

Truthfully, he doesn’t know whether sealing the vault, trapping the Dalek inside, will work. (The War Council investigated ways to keep Daleks prisoner, but if they succeeded, they never told the renegades about it – and what hope does such simple technology have in the face of a Dalek who may have fought Time Lords for aeons?)

He calls Rose, warning her about the bulkheads. He tells her to run.

Then he hits the button.

(Please, let this end better than the last time he had to press a button in the face of a Dalek assault.)

They wait agonising seconds, until the bulkhead’s shut.

“Rose?” His hearts pound rapidly in his chest. “Did you make it?”

Her exhale of breath is quiet, shuddery. It’s almost as though he can feel it against his ear. “Sorry.”

No.

“It wasn’t your fault,” her voice says in his ear. “Remember that, okay? It wasn’t your fault.”

(Yes, it was. It’s all his fault, always his fault. He made the choice. He pushed the button. IT’S HIS FAULT.)

“Exterminate!”

He pulls the earpiece out.

(There are too many shades of blue, and still not enough to measure his sorrow by.)

(Katarina was so young. Her death is his fault.)

“I killed her.” He turns slowly, looking at Van Statten as if from a long way away. (His colours start turning towards viridian, his contempt for this man swelling.) “And you’re sorry?” (After the battle of the Cruciform, an entire Dalek fleet was reduced to charred shells. Nameless or not, this is the sort of devastation that results from killing the ones he loves. The Dalek will learn this…and so will Van Statten.) “Was it worth it?”

“I wanted to touch the stars!” Van Statten cries, desperate for validation.

(Seven had the ability to speak in such a way he could shatter others. And it’s with Seven in mind that he choses the words he does, deliberately crafted to destroy this man.) “You’re about as far from the stars as you can get.”

Van Statten’s expression shatters.

(He tells The Geneticist he’s wrong. The man’s expression shatters. He has no regrets in destroying this man’s life’s work, not when the man’s daughter is still crying her eyes out in her laboratory, awaiting her test results: a projection on whether her infertility might be reversed with regeneration.)

He’s going to have to tell Jackie. She’s going to kill him, and he’s going to let her.

(And then after he regenerates, he’s going to throw himself into a sun and BURN to death, again, forever, because that’s what he deserves.)

The Dalek’s voice jolts him. When he turns towards the screen, to see Rose Tyler looking back at him, he’s never felt the sunglow of hope so keenly.

“Open the bulkhead!” The Dalek demands. “What use are emotions if you will not save the woman you love?”

(He would go so far, so far for those he loves. And trying to use his affection as leverage is always a fatal mistake.)

He hits the button again.

Then he finds a gun.

-

(The magenta cape billows in his wake as he runs towards the Dalek. He’s not going to live through another War. He’s going to destroy the Dalek. No more Daleks. And if it gets him killed in the process, if it means no more Time Lords either, then so be it.)

(Taking The Moment – “you’re going to use me to end it? By killing them all?” – ALL of them – “Daleks and Time Lords alike” – so why did this one Dalek survive? – “that’s your punishment” – the whole point of that terrible, terrible, decision – “that’s the consequence” – was Not The Doctor’s conviction worth nothing? – “You live.”)

(What’s his life even worth?)

(No more Time Lords. No more Daleks.)

-

He stands there with a gun. (No more, no more.) He has to end this.

But Rose is lit a soft pink with compassion.

The Dalek’s shell casing is open, the organic lifeform inside reaching for the sunlight.

“It’s changing,” Rose tells him, then asks, “what the hell are you changing into?”

He lowers the gun without even thinking about it. “I couldn’t…” (Lifetimes ago, Four had believed that committing genocide against the Daleks would make him no better than them.) “I wasn’t…” (A Nameless Warrior had done it anyway.)

He looks into the organic eye of the Dalek and sees a sickly lemon hue reflecting its state. The yellow-green hybrid speaks of corrupted life. The Dalek had extrapolated the biomass of a time traveller to regenerate itself, but what else did it take from Rose?

(The magenta cape slides away from him at last.) “Oh, Rose.” (It’s replaced with a cerulean ascot, grief making his throat tight.) “They’re all dead.”

“Why do we survive?”

This time, he doesn’t react angrily at the insinuation they’re in the same situation. “I don’t know.”

(No more Time Lords. No more Daleks. But he lives. That was the judgement.)

This creature isn’t a Dalek anymore.

“I’m sorry.” His words are threaded periwinkle, pity offered freely now. Colours flicker across the creature in response; wheat, accepting the gesture for what it is, then olive, disgusted and mortified at itself for understanding the nuances of emotion.

(The Skaro degradations were berserkers driven mad by feelings other than hate. Daleks are utilitarian and absolute. They cannot cope with being anything different. They exterminate different.)

“I can FEEL.” The creature is heartbroken by this defect. “Rose.” It looks up at her. (He wonders if it can see the same sort of things that he sees in her. Her simple joy, her love of life.) “Order me to die.”

(He thinks of the Cyberman piece in Van Statten’s collection. He considers the spectrum of emotions, of strengths and weaknesses. He’s sure that somewhere out there, a Cyberman is claiming vindication.)

The Dalek shrieks about sickness, demands she gives the order, demands she obeys. When Rose agrees, it’s out of mercy, a soft shade of celeste coming off her in waves.

The creature exudes a conflicting mix of relief and fear as it begins to exterminate itself. The final burst of light before it vanishes is blue-white. Contentment for death.

-

(He’d ordered the Dalek to kill itself. It had told him he’d make a good Dalek. The Dalek had chosen to kill itself.)

(He’s not like them. He’s not.)

(He’s relieved it’s dead. He’s relieved he didn’t have to kill it.)

-

He leaves Van Statten’s fate up to Diane. (Davros had been a man so sure of his place as king of his own little world, he’d held no regard for things like pity or compassion. But this meant his minions had none for him either when they deemed him inferior.) He suspects Diane will give Van Statten no less than he deserves.

-

He stands in front of the TARDIS, touching his fingers to the door. No wonder she’d been so anxious. (He’s not the only one afflicted with Time Trauma from battling against Daleks.) He silently promises to spend some time repairing her damaged sub-processors. And he’ll run a diagnostic of the quantum accelerator too; she always appreciates maintenance on that part, never mind its always in perfect condition.

(He misses The Master so much.)

He’s so grateful to still have his beautiful TARDIS. “A little piece of home,” he tells Rose. (The War took everything else from him.)

And now, with the War finally over (again), maybe he can try to move forward (again). But he doubts it.

“I win. How about that?”

(There are times when winning means nothing. This is one of those times.)

Rose suggests that if the Dalek survived maybe some of his people did too. And oh, how he wants to believe this. But he shakes his head. He goes as far as to open his mind up, letting down his mental barriers. But there’s nothing. “Feels like there’s no one.” Even though he’d already known it, to confirm it is a blow akin to losing everything all over again.

There’s no other Time Lords that exist in this temporal moment, other than him.

(He wants them here! He would gladly let The Master kill him, let The Rani recruit him. He’d begrudge them nothing, if it meant they were still alive.)

He looks at Rose. (A personal beacon of sunglow, a ray of hope in his life.) He’s glad he has her.

So, when Rose hints that maybe her new friend Adam should join them, even though he doesn’t really think much of Adam, he agrees.

-

[In another temporal moment, a man called by some as Harold Saxon watches a news report about Harriet Jones, Prime Minister, who’s looking rather tired. He drums his fingers on his desk and laughs.]

-

He makes a phone call while Rose is showing Adam the TARDIS. He’s glad it goes through to voicemail.

“Hello, Brigadier.” He swallows. “I’m not sure when you’re going to get this – timelines and all that – but, well. If you. If it’s early days, tell him I’m sorry and I hate him. If it’s later days…you wanted to know if I’d live with it. I…I’m still trying to.”

-

[In another temporal moment, a man called by some as The Brigadier plays a voicemail for Harold Saxon, Minister of Defence, who then throws a tantrum, crying and screaming. He pours them both a brandy and waits.]

-

The space station is warm. (Warm enough to make his skin prickle with lavender, anticipating discomfort ahead.)

He starts telling Adam and Rose what he knows about the time period they’ve landed in, but the reality of their surroundings doesn’t match up with his knowledge. “My history’s perfect.” Something’s wrong.

(The Time War changed many bits of history, rewriting the fabric of the universe whilst it was raging and even more so when it was done. But this doesn’t feel like old scar tissue. It’s different.)

He sends Rose and Adam off on a date, starts trying to solve the odd historical discrepancy. He finds two helpful ladies to give him a run down on Satellite Five’s function. His attention is briefly snagged by the news on the Bad Wolf channel, that the Face of Boe is pregnant; there are temporal echoes attached to this station, somehow. At first, he assumes they must be connected, but…no. These echoes aren’t to do with here and now.

(“Bad Wolf.” Time glows gold. “I bring life.”)

The situation here and now isn’t temporal in the usual sense. The historical discrepancy isn’t dimensional, it’s artificial. (He wonders if maybe the echoes are just ashes from the War.) The temporal echoes are benign in comparison, so he probably doesn’t have to worry about them.

When he calls Adam and Rose back over, something itches at him. He eyes Adam, who’s lingering by the table, his back to them. (Whatever Adam’s thinking is rooted in pride, flickering bronze.) It strikes him suddenly that something about Adam right now reminds him of Mike Yates. Mike would say Adam’s not as disciplined as he is, but to be fair, Adam hadn’t been UNIT. (Why does this momentary similarity make him uneasy?)

He tells himself it’s probably just because he’s jealous. But when he considers Adam, it isn’t emerald he senses. It’s jet black. Why would he need to be vigilant?

(Adam isn’t Mike.)

It’s probably nothing.

-

The two helpful ladies continue to be helpful by giving a technological demonstration. Cathica is an overeager overachiever, with (violet) passion and (chestnut) admiration for the system. Suki, on the other hand, her colours don’t quite align with the sweet and coy persona she portrays; she’s turquoise (her true self is a secret) and sepia (she’ll maintain her composure until her job’s done).

The demonstration begins, Cathica initiating a ‘spike’ to stream compressed information directly into her brain. “This technology’s amazing,” Adam remarks.

“This technology’s wrong,” he counters. It’s obsolete, in terms of where humanity’s progress should be, about ninety years out of date.

The demonstration is interrupted, by a glitch which is centred around Suki’s interface. Who is then (conveniently, suspiciously) offered a promotion to the elusive Floor 500. Cathica seethes emerald, envious.

He suspects Suki knows something’s wrong with this place too. She’s gathering her courage, determined to see things through. (She’s a fighter; onyx suits her.) He hugs her, letting her soak up his colours. (His colour sense may linger on her, but he doesn’t begrudge her this; her smile’s the same shape as Jo’s was.)

He watches the elevator door close on Suki and hopes she’ll be okay on her own.

“Once you go to Floor 500, you never come back.”

(He fears this means she’s as good as dead.)

-

(Most of the time, his colour sense is attuned to those around him, those within his sight. He can track intense colour trails if he concentrates, but usually he’s not sensitive to people’s colours when they aren’t nearby.)

(But he’d hugged Suki, and his colour sense had lingered on her.)

(He instinctually knows the sudden burst of white in the peripheral of his colour sense is because she’s dead.)

-

Cathica doesn’t want to know anything about what might be going on.

“You’re a journalist!” (Perhaps his expectations are too high, but Sarah Jane Smith would never stand for such ignorance.) He starts asking why. Why, why, why.

The questioning makes Cathica uncomfortable. “If there was a conspiracy, Satellite Five would have seen it.”

Not if Satellite Five IS the conspiracy. (There’s a conspiracy involving dinosaurs, General Finch, and Captain Mike Yates. And why is this the first thing that comes to mind, rather than anything involving his experiences with the High Council?)

-

It’s the central heating that proves the conspiracy exists. One should never underestimate plumbing. The system works perfectly; the rest of the station is hot because Floor 500 is an ice-box. He and Rose decide to go upstairs to investigate.

Cathica refuses to come, preferring to turn a blind eye rather than challenge the system.

(Now THIS attitude certainly brings the High Council to mind.)

-

Floor 500 is cold. (Cold enough to be the sort of chill that Eight associated with death.)

“How can you walk through the world and not leave a single footprint?”

(He leaves behind the dead he couldn’t save instead.)

All the humans who were promoted to Floor 500 are dead, including Suki, just as he feared. When he’s asked who he is, he doesn’t take the opening to reaffirm his Title. He doesn’t need to; he knows he’s The Doctor. Silence is best for now. (Three would be pleased.)

The reason why everything’s so wrong with this period of history is an alien mounted to the ceiling, with a mouthful of sharp teeth as white as death. Apparently the Mighty Jagrafess has been shaping human behaviour for nearly a century.

-

He and Rose are restrained. The Editor preaches words about influence and subjugation.

(For a moment, he’s back on Gallifrey being paraded before the authority. This man would’ve done well with a seat on the Inner Council; they were all about the satisfaction that comes with power rather than the glory. The comparison makes him inexplicitly annoyed. He doesn’t want to think about Gallifrey, doesn’t want to remember how much he hated the Council, doesn’t want to be reminded of the home he’s lost.)

His skin feels too tight (held together with scarlet stitching.) He snarls, irritated by the Editor, by the stupid human race who’ve been reduced to mindless sheep.

An additional source of colour catches his notice; Cathica’s come upstairs after all. She’s in shock – her world’s gone up in flames – and riddled with mossy disappointment, at herself and at the lack of gold (of life) she’s found here.

The Editor wants their names. Torture inflicted on himself he can endure. But the Editor subjects Rose to the same pain. “Leave her alone!” (Four begs Davros to stop hurting Sarah and Harry; Five agrees to give Mawdryn what he wants to save Nyssa and Tegan.) “I’m The Doctor; she’s Rose Tyler.”

The Editor isn’t satisfied, wants more information. But then he stops, smiles, (a flash of terracotta). The Jagrafess echoes his marvelling with a triumphant growl. “Time Lord!”

What?

(Foreboding is Two, considering the wildcard of calling the Time Lords for help. Foreboding is Four, shaking The Master’s hand but avoiding his gaze because of a confession in a tomb. Foreboding is Eight, playing chess with Morgaine and speaking of a bitter cup that’s mixed for one’s self.)

“Someone’s been telling you lies.”

“Young master Adam Mitchell?” The Editor snaps his fingers. The screen displays Adam, spiked into the system, just like Cathica was before.

The betrayal that stabs him is unexpected. It cuts him adrift (just as Mike’s had cut Three), and a platinum haze leaves him unable to distinguish the past from the present. He’d invited this man into his space, offered up information freely, had trusted the mutual admiration they had for their associate was a solid enough foundation for honest overtures of friendship. (Three had been tethered to Earth, to UNIT, he’d made an effort for Mike. For Rose’s sake, he’d been prepared to try to like Adam.)

(He remembers the earlier jet black call for vigilance. The bronze around Adam hadn’t been pride, it had been hubris.)

The Editor now knows everything Adam knows. (Adam had seen him release a Dalek to save Rose, understands how much she means to him. But Adam doesn’t COMPREHEND him, WHO he is.) The Editor’s greedy (lavender blooming, anticipation building) as he croons about the opportunity to obtain the infinite knowledge of a Time Lord. And then, caressing each syllable covetously, “T-A-R-D-I-S. TARDIS.”

(Anyone who touches his TARDIS is dead. He’ll kill them.) “You’ll never get your hands on it. I’ll DIE first!”

The Editor smiles. (Terror hits him like a bullet, the impact blooming purple.) “I’ve got the key.” And it lifts from Adam’s pocket. (His fear is heightened by the sudden rush of rage, maroon spreading into the purple, the colours near blending.)

(He’ll KILL them. The Editor, the Jagrafess, possibly Adam too. HE’LL KILL THEM.)

He snaps at Rose, betrayed that she’d given Adam the TARDIS key without asking him, even though he knows that later he’ll feel bad for taking it out on her. (She trusted Adam, just as he’d trusted Mike, just as Ace had trusted another Mike.) She can’t give someone else the key without him knowing who has it, who has access to the TARDIS.

(During the War, Dalek’s had broken through the wooden doors of his police box; he’d spent six hours caught in a firefight in the console room. It had taken him ten hours to repair the damage. The War’s over now; the doors of the TARDIS are supposed to be secure now, those doors are supposed to keep him safe, supposed to keep threats out!)

(The TARDIS keep him safe; and he keeps the TARDIS safe.)

That key belongs to HIM! (Belongs to Rose.) The Editor’s a DEAD MAN.

“And no one’s going to stop you,” he snarls, directing his (crimson) indignation towards Cathica, “because you’ve bred a human race which doesn’t bother to ask questions.”

Cathica’s colours shift to charcoal as she confidently determines her next course of action. She spikes into the system, initiating an override to disengage Adam. Then she reverses the plumbing configuration, venting the heat upstairs. The Jagrafess won’t survive the temperature increase.

The Editor shoves Suki’s body aside. He catches a glint of sepia. (Colour still lingers on her; she’ll maintain her composure until her job’s done.)

Rose’s restraints malfunction. She frees him, and they run.

(In the peripheral of his colour sense, sepia leeches out; Suki catches the Editor as he moves to escape, pulling him down. Her body is dead, but the lingering threads of colour on her corpse are enough to get her job done.)

(Good, he thinks, a burgundy tint to the sentiment. He doesn’t care if it’s cruel of him to think so, but that’s what the Editor gets for threatening the TARDIS.)

(Suki, the Editor, and the Jagrafess are consumed by white.)

Cathica, he saves.

(Counting the lives he saves one at a time.)

-

“What about your friend?” Cathica asks quietly.

He has no respect for her as a journalist, but his answer is candid. “He’s not my friend.”

He strides towards Adam. He wonders if he looks as grey (and detached from himself) as he feels. He takes back the TARDIS key. Colour rushes back in all at once: everything is red, red, red.

(His anger is entirely justified. Adam’s hubris, his self-interest, his negligence, endangered Rose’s life. Adam endangered his TARDIS – Mike had ridiculed him over his affection for the TARDIS – the TARDIS is so much more than a machine; she has a SOUL.)

He seizes Adam by the scruff of the neck. (There’s so much red, he tries to see past it.) Then Adam has the audacity to say it wasn’t his fault, to blame HIM instead, because he was in charge. (This adds scarlet irritation and he stops trying to see past it.) He shoves Adam into the TARDIS. Shoves him out into living room of his home.

(He’s uncomfortable with seeing Mike again. He doesn’t know if he can forgive Mike, but it’s clear the man’s been trying to atone for his wrongdoings.)

He gives Adam an opportunity to come clean and Adam lies to his face. So, he takes the answering machine which holds all the information Adam had stolen from the future and destroys it.

“I’ve said I’m sorry,” Adam protests, “and I am, I really am!”

(“I’m sorry Doctor.” But the apology’s given for the wrong reasons and doesn’t prevent Mike from pulling a gun on him later.)

Adam’s not sorry for what he’s done. He’s sorry he got caught.

He doesn’t accept the apology and doesn’t take Adam with him when he and Rose leave.

-

(There’s only one person who’s allowed to take liberties with his trust, with his TARDIS, with his friends, with his life, and be forgiven by him. The Master always accepted the consequences of that, so why shouldn’t everyone else?)

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -
> 
> Toshiko Sato works for Torchwood under Captain Jack Harkness.
> 
> Dutifully contributing to the ongoing gag about Harriet Jones, and her identification; as well as The Brigadier always being in Peru when he’s unavailable.
> 
> The small mention of the quantum accelerator was a little nod to chapter 16 of The First Rule: it came from The Master’s TARDIS. Take from that what you will.
> 
> Fun fact [for those who are also fans of X-Men]: I didn’t realise the irony of my decision to assign recklessness (as a branch of anger) to magenta, until I accidentally mistyped ‘Magneto’ while writing this chapter. I laughed for five minutes, then was unable to stop myself from turning what was supposed to be a one-off cape mention into a drawn-out metaphor of trauma.
> 
> Some dialogue, text and information taken from Doctor Who episodes including; Aliens of London; World War Three; Dalek; The Long Game; as well as a plethora of Classic Who episodes; and others are referenced because I am a Doctor Who sponge.
> 
> -


	3. The Name of The Doctor (Nine)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -
> 
> There’s some déjà vu throughout this chapter because of Rule Breaking.
> 
> -

-33-

-

He’s doing some repairs in the TARDIS – trying to separate two laboratories which have somehow ended up colliding into one room – when he comes across the sphere.

(One day, whilst working for UNIT, he’d been captured when a secret task force attempted to steal his TARDIS. He’d been unconscious for most of the aftermath, waking shortly before The Brigadier arrived to rescue him. Benton told him afterwards that The Brigadier had punched the General who’d secretly orchestrated the whole thing.)

(The next day, the General went missing. His body turned up thirteen hours later.)

(That same day, an anonymous package arrived for The Brigadier, containing a sphere and a handwritten story. A tragedy about a young boy called Nine who runs away from home and is taken in by a mentor called Colonel. Nine’s best friend, who remains nameless in the tale, is abducted by the evil Toclafane. The Colonel destroys the Toclafane, but the abducted boy is killed. Nine cries, then decides he wants to be a physician when he grows up. The story ends with the friend turning into a zombie and killing Nine.)

(All it had taken was The Brigadier’s raised eyebrow for him to confess that the value of nine comes from Theta, that the Toclafane were an old Gallifreyan ghost story, and that The Master had indeed used up all twelve regenerations, traditionally what would be the full count of them.)

(He’d found an identical sphere in his lab along with his sonic screwdriver, which The General had confiscated from him during his captivity.)

Carefully, he reaches for the sphere. It has a pleasant weight to it (it’s a sphere, not an orb), and it’s an onyx colour.

(“Courage, my dear Doctor. We won’t let the Council take your TARDIS.”)

He decides there’s nothing wrong with these two laboratories occupying the same space, rather than trying to restore them to the way they were. Some things continue to be as they are, even if the shape of them changes.

-

Rose’s dad died on November the 7th 1987.

He sits there, turning the sphere over in his hands. Rose is hesitant (timid with aquamarine) as she speaks, asking to see him when he was alive. (Who wouldn’t want to see the loved ones they’ve lost again, if they could?) “If we can’t, if it goes against the Laws of Time or something, then never mind, just leave it.” She tries to hide her true feelings behind a sullen tone, but he sees the moss shading her disappointment.

It’s not the Rules he’s concerned with. “I’m just more worried about you.” (He knows the bittersweet dangers of chasing ghosts.) But he understands.

-

(He should really know better by now, thinking he has no reason to be concerned about the First Law of Time.)

-

He takes Rose to watch her parents get married. Peter Tyler fumbles nervously through his vows. He seems a nice man. Though this ceremony bears no resemblance to the one in which The Brigadier wed Doris, it’s still on his mind.

(Three had arrived by accident and was pleasantly surprised The Brigadier had specifically anticipated HIM as The Doctor who would be his best man. He’d made a typical best man speech, in which he told a mixture of stories demonstrating either the man’s incompetence or his heroism. He’d cried, much to his embarrassment at the time, and The Brigadier’s amusement. Amongst the wedding presents was a bottle of brandy, with the gift tag only signed with the Greek letter for Omicron. He’d made much bluster about how it should be thrown it out; The Brigadier had drunk it anyway.)

Rose grows pensive as she watches her father. Soft swirls of azure flow from her as her thoughts turn to the man’s death, rather than his life.

[“I only wish there’d been someone there for him,” Jackie Tyler tells her young daughter.]

Rose wants to be there for him, so her father doesn’t have to die alone.

(He remembers his own deaths, thinks of the companions who were there for him as he died and after he regenerated. He tries not to remember Not The Doctor, standing alone in a barn. Thinks instead of The Rani, who was left alone in a Vault.)

No one should have to die alone.

-

“You sure about this?” He asks. Her confirmation is quick, but the word is apprehensive, a streak of plum.

He takes a deep breath, suddenly hyperaware of the fit of his jumper as his chest expands. He’s wearing a green one today. He’s not sure why he felt he needed it. (Green is shame. He knows exactly why he needs it.) It feels an appropriate colour to wear while reflecting on lives unfairly cut short. (It’s such a shame, people say, to lament wasted lives and wasted opportunities.)

They find the street, stand on the sidewalk. (Rose’s colours are washed out by the cream of what she’s expecting.) A car pulls up and he takes Rose’s hand. Peter Tyler gets out of the car, holding a vase. Another car comes flying around the corner; this car is tan, the colour of patience.

It happens fast.

(It hits him like a physical blow: the sense of Time being superimposed, one timeline and another being laid on top of each other, the new one pressing down until everything of the old one is erased.)

(It should happen like this: The vase shatters on the ground. The tan car speeds off with a screech of tyres. Peter Tyler lies on the road, his colours slowly bleaching into white.)

(Instead, it happens like this: The vase does not shatter. The tan car speeds off with a screech of tyres. Peter Tyler stands in the road, vibrant and still alive.)

It happens fast.

Rose runs past him, even though she still stands beside him. She pulls Peter Tyler out of the way of the tan car. The vase rolls away, unbroken.

He stares in horrified bewilderment (falters at the ash grey confusion which inhabits his lungs) and starts turning, to look at the Rose beside him, to try and make sense of –

-

[Time S H A T T E R S.]

-

The world goes white around him.

(Not just white; white smoke. Something is wrong, HE is wrong.) He blinks. (He’s dead, but he isn’t: he exists only until Time catches up with him. Everything hurts.)

He notices that he has company.

There is an old man standing before him, staring at him with tired eyes that have seen aeons. He is wearing a bandolier. “Doctor?”

“You,” he breathes in horror. (The entire spectrum of red explodes in his chest: scarlet, vermillion, crimson, magenta, maroon, mahogany, burgundy, dark red.) “You!” (Anger: irritation, aggression, indignation, recklessness, rage, loathing, cruelty, hate.) He launches himself forwards.

His fingers pass through his Nameless self’s neck rather than fasten around it. They both rock back in surprise, realising they cannot touch.

He laughs bitterly. “Fantastic.” (Two Roses means two Doctors. He’d broken the Rules, for her, and she’d broken Time for herself; and now he’s suffering for it.) “Why is it that Time can be changed by any stupid ape that wants to undo their own grief, and yet – my entire planet died, my whole family!” (His grief is a tight rope of cerulean, he struggles to breathe around it.) “And here you are and I can’t even…” Here stands the one responsible, untouched. (Three rages that he’s forced to bear the consequences of Two’s decision.) “I can’t change what you did. What we did.” That Moment cannot ever be undone.

The Nameless Warrior says nothing.

(He spent so long, put so much effort, into trying to break the First Rule so he could meet another Doctor. In the end, he’d reluctantly come to terms with it never going to happen. And now he’s here, with this Nameless incarnation instead. What has HE done to deserve this unfairness?)

HE. Is. The. Ninth. DOCTOR.

(Because he is a shard of himself, a residual piece of a redundant timeline, his colour sense has been diluted. He can’t see anything outside of himself – everything else is painted over with the white smoke of WRONG – and this includes his company, who appears colourless as a result. He’s glad. My life is coloured plenty enough with my own emotions, he thinks, I don’t need any of yours too.)

He glares. “I hate you.” (The words taste dark red, the only colour he wants to associate with this Nameless man; to watch him bleed with it.) “I wish I could kill you.”

But what would happen if you chose to deliberately murder your past incarnation?

(He wants to find out.) What’s the worst thing that could happen? His time stream unravelling? (His future selves – one is wearing a brown suit and the other has a bow tie – would thank him for it. He wants to kill this man, consequences be damned.)

“I know.” Not The Doctor says.

The fractured timeline he belongs to is fading into nonexistence, and him along with it. He’s beginning to turn transparent; an absence of colour. (He IS colour; without it, he cannot exist.)

“You killed them all.”

“I know.”

He shudders, hands pulling his jacket around him defensively, like armour. He’ll cling to this last pigment until the end. (His jet black jacket, he wears to stay vigilant. He cannot deny it’s also a shield, a way to blanket himself on his Bad Days, when he wants to block out the colours and erase himself.) “I want NOTHING to do with you!” His voice is thick with anguish. (The jumper beneath his jacket is green; he’s wearing his shame.) “Go and BURN.” (Along with everything else that you BURN.)

“This is for me.” Not The Doctor agrees softly. “Go back to your life; go and be The Doctor that I could never be.” A pause, as if the man is tasting the Title he lacks on his tongue. “Make it worthwhile.”

(“I am Not The Doctor,” he says; “War-Doctor then,” The Master retorts indifferently, as if he knows better.)

The last thing he sees as he vanishes completely is the conviction in The War Doctor’s dark (sepia) eyes.

-

[Time S H A T T E R S. The pieces reform.]

-

“You sure about this?” He asks. Her confirmation is quick, but the word is apprehensive, a streak of plum.

He takes a deep breath, suddenly hyperaware of the fit of his jumper as his chest expands. He’s wearing a green one today. He’s not sure why he felt he needed it. (Green is shame. He knows exactly why he needs it.) It feels an appropriate colour to wear while reflecting on lives unfairly cut short. (It’s such a shame, people say, to lament wasted lives and wasted opportunities.)

They find the street, stand on the sidewalk. (Rose’s colours are washed out by the cream of what she’s expecting.) A car pulls up and he takes Rose’s hand. Peter Tyler gets out of the car, holding a vase. Another car comes flying around the corner; this car is tan, the colour of patience.

It happens fast.

The vase shatters on the ground. The tan car speeds off with a screech of tyres. Peter Tyler lies on the road, his colours slowly bleaching into white.

“Go to him,” he tells Rose. “Quick.”

But she can’t.

-

Rose cries.

They lean against a wall, the bricks a soft burgundy which mock the cruelty she’s suffering. Neither of them speaks until the wail of ambulance sirens sound out.

“It’s too late now.” Rose’s grief is a heaving sea of cerulean. Desperately, she beseeches, “he can’t die on his own!” Her colours shift into a much lighter blue – a calmness, rather than a storm – and for some reason a chill runs down his spine. “Can I try again?”

His automatic instinct is NO. He forces himself to reconsider the request as objectively as he’s able. (The Master had been alone as he was unmade. What he wouldn’t give to have another opportunity, to be there for him as he died.) The High Council doesn’t exist anymore to protest his actions, and no one knows how to bend the Rules as well as him. Maybe…maybe it can be done.

That’s not to say he thinks this is a good idea. (He thinks this is a HORRIBLE idea. But Rose is hurting, and he’s a Doctor: he has to at least try to fix it.) It might not even work. The TARDIS can be finicky in these sorts of situations on a good day, and he hasn’t tried for such precision since long before the War.

The TARDIS repositions herself with apparent ease. But the mood of the engines is submissive, and the blue-grey hue makes him bite his lip.

(Two aims the TARDIS for the previous day; the TARDIS moves willingly and without a single shudder. A time distortion seizes him and The Brigadier, and deposits them into the Death Zone. Five lands the TARDIS in the right place, but the wrong time zone. There are two Brigadiers to consider. Six inputs the coordinates, but the TARDIS bristles; they’re the same co-ordinates he’d used when he was Two. For the sake of both Doctors, she takes flight anyway.)

When he exits the TARDIS, he’s immediately hit with a migraine. Every one of his senses lights up with mauve, screaming at him for caution.

-

(He can taste white smoke on his tongue. It’s in his throat, in his chest. This situation, what he’s doing, is very wrong.)

His misgivings grow as he looks out at the sidewalk where their earlier selves stand.

(It’s…different. Seeing himself like this. It feels…odd. Disjointing. Wrong. It’s not quite the same as meeting his other selves, and yet…it doesn’t feel entirely unknown. Has he ever done this before? Have any of his past selves met their own incarnation before? He can’t remember – which usually indicates he has in fact broken the Rules.)

He looks at himself, his earlier self. He’s expecting his defining colour to be grief, to match his cerulean eyes. But it’s not. It’s vigilance; jet black, exactly the same shade as his jacket.

(It’s easier to feel proud with himself when the sentiment is being directed at another version of himself, instead of himself, even if the other version of himself is still himself.)

His head hurts. (Remain vigilant.) “It’s a very bad idea, two sets of us being here at the same time.” He makes it clear to Rose they can’t be seen by their counterparts.

Rose’s resolve wavers. “I can’t do this.” He won’t think less of her for it. (Wanting to be there for them is one thing, watching a loved one die is far more difficult.) But he makes it clear this is the last time they can try.

Time is under tension. He knows how delicate any situation involving transgressing the Rules is, understands how careful he needs to be. (He will remain vigilant.) As long as they don’t interact with their previous selves, the situation should be manageable.

But Rose is human, a linear being, and she doesn’t understand Time at all. As Peter Tyler gets out of car, she runs towards him.

“Rose, no!”

(Instead, it happens like this: The vase does not shatter. The tan car speeds off with a screech of tyres. Peter Tyler stands in the road, vibrant and still alive.)

It happens fast.

Rose runs past his earlier self, past HER earlier self. She pulls Peter Tyler out of the way of the tan car. The vase rolls away, unbroken.

He watches with a (grey) sort of detachment as his earlier self stares, falters (ash grey with confusion), and then –

[Time S H A T T E R S.]

– vanishes –

The world around him goes up in white smoke.

(Somewhere nearby, the Cloister bell rings, reverberating across this Time. Somewhere in the past, a time distortion splices a body apart, leaving a Watcher behind. Somewhere in the future, regeneration energy is misappropriated, and the detritus forms The Valeyard. Somewhere nearby, a time machine screams.)

When the world comes back, he’s still suffocating on molten platinum, still disassociating. (He feels his timestream splinter, feels the echo of the self who’d vanished dissolve away into nothing as that timeline unwrites itself.) It takes a little longer before he comes back to himself.

A flush of tangerine: Rose, amazed, speaking to her still-alive father. She looks over her shoulder at him.

He stares back. He’s mottled, a bruised mess of ivory, thick moss, viridian, lime, fandango. (Pain, disapproval and disappointment, contempt, ill, anxious.) Maroon and dark blue. (The cruel despair that comes with betrayal.) And an immense lashing of green. (Such a shame; shame, shame, shame.) But she can’t see any of his hurt.

-

Peter is a nice man, but he should be dead.

Rose is so proud of what she’s done. So pleased. She speaks about Peter’s newly reclaimed future, as if there’s nothing wrong. (She’s the same vibrant, joyous yellow as when she’d agreed to come with him.) “When we met,” he says slowly, “I said ‘travel with me in space.’ You said ‘no.’ Then I said ‘time machine.’” (Had he been mistaken about her intentions all this time? He recalls the Gelth, who’d really been white, not periwinkle; and Adam, whose bronze aura had been from hubris, not pride. Had Rose’s colours deceived him too?)

Rose insists she didn’t plan this, that she saw it happening and deciding to stop it was as simple as thinking it.

(He doesn’t know if this makes it better or worse.) His smile isn’t a nice one. Humans are such a selfish species, in their hearts. “It’s not about showing you the universe, it never is. It’s about the universe doing something for you.” (“They don’t really care about you, Doctor, only what you can do for them.”) When Rose tries to pass judgement on his actions, on the lives he saves, he gets angry. (The Master and The Rani are old friends, but Six knows he’s angry enough to hurt them, fears he’s angry enough to do worse.) “I know what I’m doing, you don’t!” (Mawdryn’s arrogance in trying to command life and death, his ignorance about the intricacies of the Laws of Time, infuriates Five.)

“But he’s alive!” Rose cries.

“My entire planet died, my whole family! Do you think it never occurred to me to go back and save them?”

She doesn’t even acknowledge him, acknowledge how much pain this must (and does) cause a temporal being, for every moment of his existence. (The Time War is locked, Before and After sundered apart. He could break the Rules, see his family again. But to do so would tear the universe apart. What was the point in BURNING to save the universe, if a single moment of grief renders the universe into nothingness?) His losses aren’t less important than hers!

He tries valiantly for calm, but light blue is beyond him presently. (Rose is a time traveller now – did she learn nothing from the incident with the Dalek? The actions of those who walk in time carry more weight than others.) Why can’t she understand what she’s done?

(You cannot interact with your other selves, cannot cross your own timestream, cannot alter your own personal history!)

Rose’s aggression feels colder than he thought vermillion could be. “What, would you rather him dead?” (Of course not! But as far as Time is concerned, he IS dead.) “For once, YOU’RE not the most important man in my life.” What does THIS have to do with anything? (But her words remind him of Liz Shaw, who’d left because the qualities she’d once admired in him, she’d grown resentful of.)

He demands Rose’s TARDIS key. “If I’m so insignificant, then give me it back.”

She does, slapping it into his hand like it’s worth nothing, like their friendship (like HE) is worth nothing. He tells her goodbye like he means it and storms off.

“You don’t scare me,” she snarls at him. “I know how sad you are.” She’s viciously confident in her belief he’ll either be back or will wait for her. “And I’ll make you wait a long time!”

-

Shame, shame. Shame, shame. (He breathes, his green shirt moving with each breath.) He wouldn’t leave Rose stranded in the past, of course, (the TARDIS is silent and Three is stranded in linear time) but he’s still ashamed of himself for even suggesting it. Shame, shame. Shame, shame.

Not all the shame here is his though.

Rose has never used his loneliness, his sorrow, as a weapon before. It hurts, more so because it’s so unexpected. Though, in hindsight, he has no right to feel blind sighted by this. (He’s had his fair share of dysfunctional relationships, and what does this say about him?) He’ll give Rose some time to calm down, (himself time to recover from this unintentional betrayal,) then he’ll try to explain the situation better.

(He misses Turlough all of a sudden, quite fiercely. Turlough always understood him.)

It’s a blessed relief, to turn the corner and see the TARDIS at the end of the street.

Something itches at his temporal senses. (He’s broken a Law of Time, and there will be consequences.) He doesn’t know what to do about the changed timeline. (Past transgressions have always resulted in consequences for himself, and his other selves. But this time, there’s only HIMself involved here.) He thinks about watching his counterpart vanish, as the earlier timeline collapsed. (There would’ve been consequences for that residual version of himself. Maybe that will be enough.)

He hesitates. (Wrinkles his nose; there’s lilac, uncertainty.) Time is bleeding. (There’s something sharp just out of reach, like a needle readying to suture up the wound.) But as he looks around, there’s nothing there.

He slides the key into the lock, turns it, and knows instantly that something’s very, very wrong.

He pushes both doors open to find the inside of the police box is empty. Blue wooden walls contain an inside that’s precisely the dimensions which correlate to the shell of the outside.

They’ve taken the TARDIS. (Horror slams into his chest, a growing purple bruise, he can’t breathe.) He steps inside, hands fumbling at the walls. (The outer walls are blue, are sorrow; but these inner walls, walls which shouldn’t exist, are dark blue, are despair.) This IS the TARDIS, not just an empty police box in her place. What’s happened to her? (He can’t get enough air. He can’t, he can’t lose the TARDIS.)

(He can taste fandango; anxiety flooding his senses. A distant part of his mind, which sounds remarkably like Four, notes he’s having a panic attack.)

He doesn’t know what’s happened to the TARDIS. But he suspects how it’s happened: he recalls an analogy he’d once used to explain the relative dimensions to a companion, of two different sized boxes, and how perspective allows the larger to fit inside the smaller. Someone, somehow, has separated the two plains.

(He beats back against the creeping cerulean tendrils of grief: he refuses to mourn her yet.)

If the TARDIS was an ephemeral being, a physical woman, this would be the equivalent of her having been shot in the chest and hooked up to life support – the empty shell of her body still breathes, but there’s no sign of awareness. It’s impossible to tell whether she’s in a coma, or brain dead. Where is her soul?

(His hearts break, splinter into ivory fragments of anguish.)

There are few creatures capable of feeding on a TARDIS.

Such creatures will be drawn to temporal inconsistencies. Like a man who should be dead; or a daughter who’s older than her younger self present in this time period. “Rose!” He runs.

-

He tracks Rose’s colour trail to the church. Her colours are an upset mess; though they’ve settled into something more bittersweet now. (A blend of amethyst and iris; pleased yet pining.) She hears him shout for her; her colours turn smug. (Marigold and cream; amused and expectant.) It takes him a moment to remember they argued, but he doesn’t care about that anymore. He’ll give her anything she wants, if it means she’s going to be okay, alive and safe. He’ll protect her and her whole family, including Peter.

He feels another fierce itch (he, Rose, and Peter are three anomalies in this same space, and it draws attention) and glances up to where he senses the temporal disturbance.

A Reaper materialises.

Then another, and another.

(He’s incapable of ignoring the primal instinct of cowardice inflicted by the sight of them. Indigo quivers in his very soul.)

He orders everyone into the church. He slams the doors shut and tells himself these wooden doors will hold better than the TARDIS’s did. (What happened to you, old girl? Have you been displaced? Or were you disembowelled?) “The older something is, the stronger it is.” The words taste like ash in his mouth. The TARDIS was vulnerable because she broke the Rules; this church is moored in linear history and should have strong enough foundations to keep the Reapers at bay.

A familiar voice demands an explanation. (I’d face you, he’d sworn to himself, if anything happened, I’d come back to tell you.) He spins around to face Jackie Tyler. “There’s been an accident in Time, a wound in Time.” (He grapples for his colour sense. Reapers see the world through a crimson lens: a wound to Time is an indignation to them.) But as he’s making no sense to her, Jackie gets agitated with him, so he sends her to check the other doors.

The groom comes up to speak to him, offering up his malfunctioning telephone which keeps receiving a voice. “Watson, come here. I need you.” The very first telephone call that was ever made. Time here has folded in on itself, like a failed soufflé: everything’s collapsing in around its centre point.

“Time’s been damaged, and they’ve come to sterilise the wound.”

He knows he probably sounds angry, but he holds no hostility towards the Reapers. (He’s angry with himself, because he already knows how he repair the damage that’s been done here.) Reapers aren’t monsters; they’re just creatures, and it’s in their nature to heal, not destroy. As a Doctor, he can respect them as a species.

(He’s seen a Reaper only once before. He doesn’t remember much of the incident; he’d been semi-conscious. The Man had been screaming it was an accident; Omicron had been screaming The Man was a liar. The Man had been radiating with time energy that wasn’t his own; when the Reaper appeared, it sucked the time energy from him. Omicron’s shout of triumph had been dark, then Omicron had clung to him as the Reaper approached, assessing them. He can’t remember what happened after that. They both woke in the infirmary; The Woman had cried, she’d hugged him and thanked Omicron for saving him.)

He and Rose look at each other, silver tinting the distance between them. “Is this because…” she ventures quietly. “Is this my fault?”

He doesn’t answer her.

-

He looks out a window. He sees the tan car materialise, tyres screeching before it vanishes again, caught inside its own time loop. (He wonders about causality – this car is tan and will remain patiently in its loop until the loop ends – wonders about Time and inevitability.) Peter looks out the window too, frowning. He seems to instinctively know the car was there.

“It’s not important,” he lies.

(Green whispers; it’s such a shame.)

He’ll do his best to find a way to let Rose keep her father.

-

“Can you save us?” The bride asks him. He asks for their names – Stuart Hoskins and Sarah Clark and their unborn child. “And I know we’re not important –”

“Who said you’re not important?” He looks at these two incredible humans, so brave (an onyx strength), with their story of a street corner, two in the morning, getting a taxi home. (It glitters coral, with their awe and his.) “I’ve never had a life like that.” (Many of his first meetings are shadowed by the past and/or future.)

But he still doesn’t know what to do.

-

Jackie gives him baby Rose to look after.

(It’s a small mercy, that the time loop outside and Peter Tyler’s continued existence are dampening the Reapers perception of inside the church walls. He, Rose, and Peter are somewhat out of sync with this new timeline – or it’s out of sync with them – so the Reapers have so far remained tolerant about there being TWO Rose Tylers in close proximity.)

“Now, Rose, you’re not going to bring about the end of the world, are you?” It’s mostly a joke. But it’s HIS world that’s likely to come to an end, where she’s concerned. (He loves her, and his love always lends itself to tragedy.)

Rose, his Rose, leans forward to get a better look at her younger self. “No.” The word is sharp amber to hold her attention. Outside, the Reapers screech. (Their tolerance has its limits and can slip away as swiftly as the grains of sand it’s coloured for.) “Don’t touch the baby.”

(There’s two Brigadiers, reaching out to touch. When they connect, the Rule violation displaces time to such an extent it alters The Brigadier’s memories for six years of his life, suppressing all traces of his Rule breaking friend. Broken Rules and Rule Breakers – which is the cause, and which is the effect?)

Rose insists she’s not stupid. “You could have fooled me.” He inhales. (Green material shifts; shame.) He relents. “All right. I’m sorry.” He looks at her tear-stricken face, her midnight blue weariness. He tells her he doesn’t have any idea on how to fix this. “No way out,” he lies.

“You’ll think of something.” This is shaded ebony; she believes it.

Humanity, as a species, is practically gone. The Reapers have taken almost the entire planet. He can feel the future crumpling in on itself, in anticipation of this present becoming part of history.

(There’s a navy-blue film clinging to his skin, helplessness seeping into his pores. He shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions about the value of life when the consequences reach beyond him, are universal.) “There used to be Laws stopping this kind of thing from happening. My people would’ve stopped this.” The High Council used to monitor the temporal zone for fluctuations, exacting preventative measures for things like Reaper activity, or parallel universe breaches. (They could even regulate Rule violations, so the damage was limited to the Rule Breaker alone.) “But they’re all gone.” With the Time Lords gone, the fluidity of Time is more vulnerable, easily wounded.

And this time, Rose seems to understand the weight of his grief, in the context of his temporal nature. Realises that even though he misses them every day, he cannot go back and save them.

(He cannot even SEE them again.)

“Just. Tell me you’re sorry.”

She nods. “I am.” She glitters sapphire with remorse. “I’m sorry.”

He touches her face, smiles. As they embrace, he wishes he could guarantee her only joy in her future. But even though he’s made of vigilance, the sum of his lives is sorrow, and this is what his life eventually brings all of those who touch him.

Rose frowns, reaches into his jacket pocket, then hastily relinquishes the too-hot object she’s retrieved. The TARDIS key lands on the floor. It’s glowing, golden with life.

(Hope is a touch of sunglow on the horizon. Optimism is the warmth of fresh saffron.) He peels off his jacket and reverently uses it to pick up the key. (Cradling it within the black material to keep it safe.)

An inspection of the key reveals a dyadic variance: the physical key is calling to the missing interdimensional energy that belongs within it. Energy that still exists. He peers closer, concentrating, trying to see beyond the physical, and finds jet black within its empty shell. Vigilance. The TARDIS had known what would happen.

Which means The TARDIS had allowed herself to be mutilated, probably in an effort to protect him.

(Six, assisting UNIT with a Sontaran invasion, delivered a pointed parable about some friends who meet trouble in a dark alley. Their attacker threatens to mutilate the entire group with a knife. The older man flees immediately; the attacker permits this. The younger man offers to surrender his valuables in exchange for safe passage; the attacker accepts the valuables, then mutilates the man’s hands and face anyway. The woman tells the attacker she intends to fight for the knife; the attacker pulls out a gun and shoots her instead. The woman dies; the younger man never recovers; the attacker is never caught.)

(“And what of the older man?” The Brigadier had asked. He’d replied with ‘what older man,’ and the question’s impact on the mood and details of the tale had been the whole point.)

(Later, The Brigadier had asked him which character he’d been. Six, sitting outside of his ruined lab, had laughed humourlessly. “I’m the younger man, I suppose. The TARDIS is always the woman; I’m glad she’s harder to kill than the rest of us.” And when The Brigadier then speculated that made the attacker The Master, Six laughed and laughed.)

He turns the key over in his hands. If the TARDIS was a physical woman, shot and on life support, she’s currently having an out of body experience. The glow of the key is a sign she’s trying to find her way back, to wake up. He’s so, so relieved that she’s still alive.

When all eyes turn towards him, hopeful in the face of his sudden joy, he realises what he has to do. In most mythologies, reapers collect the dead. To restabilise the timeline, either the aberration has to be corrected, or the Reapers need to feed on something which embodies death. He won’t ask Peter to die. (He tries not to imagine how The Master would taunt him, suggesting The Doctor sacrifice him; would then mock upon hearing the actual idea.)

(The Master had once used the Eye of Harmony, trying to syphon his regenerations, his lives. He could use the Eye of Harmony to syphon the essence of one of his past selves. But while he’d gladly offer up the Nameless self to the Reapers, they’d be far more interested in Eight. The thought of sacrificing Eight, or any other of The Doctors, is abhorrent. Not to mention subjecting the TARDIS to this right after she’s suffered self-inflected trauma, to spare him. But what choice does he have?)

“I can mend everything,” He announces.

(It may not end with Eight. Even though Eight never got to meet any of their other selves, Eight was death, and bound to each of The Doctors before him by their deaths. The Reapers may take ALL the previous Doctors – but by nature of being Not The Doctor, that incarnation may be spared despite all the death he wrought.)

He surveys the remaining humans in the church. He feels exposed without his jacket, his green jumper on open display. Can they all see his shame?

(Is this what he deserves? To lose all The Doctors, to be left only Nameless?)

(What are his losses worth?)

-

Peter approaches Rose. He tries to grant them privacy, but he can’t block out their colours anymore than he can renounce his Rule Breaking and the toll it’s taken on him and his other selves. Rose is lying, (turquoise secrecy overlaying an iris longing) nostalgic for something that isn’t true. And Peter (teal suspicions and a sinking beige resignation) suspects the truth.

He places the key into the air.

(Please. Please.)

A lock appears first, transparent but real, oh so real. Then the doors follow, and the walls, until a luminous outline of the TARDIS takes shape. (Violet blooms; he’s ecstatic.) He pulls his jacket back on, (there’s no shame here anymore,) his heart bursting with love.

“Stuart, Sarah. You’re going to get married, just like I said.” 

The TARDIS wheezes, faint and ailing, incrementally dragging itself back into alignment. (Come on, old girl, he thinks. I know you can do this. Come back to me.) He loves the TARDIS so much.

He looks to Rose. He has an abundance of orchid affection for her too.

He takes the time to reassure her worries. “The thing that you changed will stay changed.”

“You mean I’ll still be alive,” Peter says from behind them. “That’s why I haven’t done anything with my life, why it didn’t mean anything.” He won’t let that stand, won’t let this man wallow in the wheat that makes him accept such a notion, and insists that’s not how life and death work. But the wheat is seeded too deeply. “I was so useless I couldn’t even die properly.”

Join the club, he thinks.

(How many times has he struggled to function in the aftermath of a regeneration? Five couldn’t count; Six nearly killed Peri; Eight forgot his other selves and his Name. And despite having no desire to survive, HE did.)

An argument breaks out amongst the Tylers and almost immediately he walks away. (Jackie’s hair isn’t red, but the crinkled style is reminiscent of The Rani’s. Peter’s defensiveness, his frustration at the perception of his worthlessness, is a mirror of his own. Rose’s discomforted silence at knowing more than she’s saying and less about what to say isn’t much like The Master’s at all, who had instead been coldly calculating, waiting for the right opening to interject and make everything worse.) He doesn’t do families, he can’t do families.

He just needs a moment. He just needs a moment to breathe.

(He should know better. Nothing but disaster ever occurs when he takes a Moment.)

He turns to see Peter placing (infant) Rose in (older) Rose’s arms. He shouts, aghast, and rushes forward. But the damage is already done. A Reaper materialises inside the church. Everyone screams.

(The sight of the Reaper sends tremors of indigo through him.)

He fights back the urge to surrender to his cowardice, to flee. “I’m the oldest thing in here.” He steps forward, lets the Reaper assess him. (He doesn’t know if he’s going to be enough, alone, to sate the Reapers. If he’s not enough, Time may never recover.) The Reaper descends on him.

He hears Rose scream his name.

-

[Time S H A T T E R S.]

(He is devoured.)

(The last thing he’s aware of is the TARDIS – the key becomes her corpse.)

[T i m e S H A T T E R S.]

-

The world goes white around him.

(He’s dead, but he isn’t: he’ll exist like this until Time catches up with him and decides which.)

He notices that he has company.

There is a young man standing before him, staring at him in mild bewilderment. He’s wearing a dark suit (he’s safe), his shirt marred with a dark red stain (so much blood, such hate). “Doctor?”

(For one hearts-stopping moment he thinks he’s looking in a mirror, seeing his own trauma reflected back at him.) He doesn’t recognise this man’s face. “Do I…know you?”

The man rolls his eyes in exasperation. “It’s me.” He spreads his arms and waits expectantly.

“You,” he breathes. (Always a reflection, regardless of recognition.) “You!” He launches himself forward.

He could kiss this man. He punches him in the face instead.

The Master grins – an old grin on a new face – and touches his fingers to the spot on his jaw. “I’ll give you that one. I deserved it, for your TARDIS.” The Master tips his head back. “And, well.” He gestures to his bloody shirt.

(The Master is stained blood-red, the hate indicative of the sum of his lives – and deaths – rather than it being a singular trait of his current incarnation. The defining colour specific to this incarnation is green, as green as his own jumper. This Master, when he lived, was shame.)

He glances up as well. Light blue lightning crackles and arcs overhead, but the artron energy does not induce calm in him. He looks back at The Master, at the endless expanse of white around them. (Death.) “You left me!” He shouts. “You died, and you LEFT ME!”

The Master says nothing. (But there’s marigold and chocolate; amusement and appreciation over the outburst.)

He inhales slowly. (There’s a flicker of those colours all his own, at the advantage his colour sense gives him in reading The Master.) He exhales. “You’re dead.”

“Well, yes.” The Master’s tone implies ‘obviously,’ and he shrugs a shoulder. “But here we are. Is spending the rest of our deaths stuck here together, forever, enough for you?”

“No.”

The Master’s eyes widen only slightly (but the burst of orange speaks volumes to his surprise), then he smirks. “I’m sorry – which temporal term should I have used instead?” (A brush of charcoal, confidence this comment will provoke a deliberate reaction.)

“I hate you.” But his tone says something entirely different.

(I miss you. I mourn you. I forgive you. I love you.)

“I know.”

He hesitates. He reaches out, lets his hand hover there between them. The Master stares at it for so long he thinks the gestures been rejected, but as he starts to let his hand fall The Master snatches at his wrist instead and holds on. The calculating look The Master levels him with isn’t entirely unexpected.

“I’m sorry, but how did you get here?” (Lilac, doubt at an initial assumption; teal, new suspicions.) “You number your selves; which Doctor are you?”

He knows what it’s going to say about him, and about the Time War. “Ninth.”

The reaction is immediate. (The smallest flicker of pink; the briefest hint of compassion.) “You lived.” The grip on his wrist tightens, The Master (hot, bright vermillion; aggression) scowls. “If you’ve killed yourself, I’ll kill you!”

He decides to not address the likelihood of that having happened (or still ever happening). “I broke the Rules again. Failed to consider my companion; Rose agitated the Reapers.”

The Master scoffs lightly, but his grip doesn’t loosen at all. “Always the women.” He smiles depreciatingly, as if at an inside joke. He wonders if The Rani was responsible for this Master’s death; there’d been a few incidents she’d been involved in which required the Council to resurrect the man.

(The Rani, who’d long been obsessed with the Cruciform. The Cruciform, which had killed The Master, had unmade him. He can’t help but wonder what that would be like, being unmade.)

“Don’t go on the Cruciform mission,” he blurts out.

The Master gives him a long, unreadable (but periwinkle, pitying) look. “Still breaking Rules for me, Doctor?”

“Bending Rules,” he protests automatically. If Rose can (break) bend the Rules to save someone’s life, he’s entitled to do so when he’s (mostly) dead. If the Reapers consume him utterly, they’ll probably take most of the universe too – humanity has touched so much – so what does it matter now if he rewrites his own history, and consequently all of Time and space? “Don’t go on the Cruciform mission,” he repeats, and can’t prevent himself from sounding plaintive and pathetic.

The Master can’t resist such an obvious show of weakness. “And send you instead? I’m sorry; who’s going to end the War then? Me?” A pointed look, which is fair enough. The very idea of The Master in possession of The Moment is terrifying. (There’s a tomb, and a ring, and The Master would choose unwisely.) The Master pauses. (Is that blue, sorrow?) He lays out his next point bluntly. “You can’t change what you did, Doctor. So, live with it.”

He snarls. “I’m trying!” The words fall from his lips before he can catch them.

(A gleam of copper; though whether this respect is due to his show of temper, his admission –) “I’m sorry I missed it. You, in that Moment,” (– or that he wielded The Moment and survived it, he isn’t sure.) The Master taps a finger to his chest. “It was the only choice. I approve.”

After a short silence, he says “that’s not exactly reassuring.” But his mouth twitches upwards. The Master’s always had strong opinions about both of their self-destructive tendencies. “Warmongery.”

The Master raises an eyebrow. “Philosophy,” he accuses in turn, then quotes “‘if we don’t end war, war will end us.’”

(The Master is grave when he states the War is going to destroy him; The War Doctor knows it already has.)

He retaliates with “‘War does not determine who is right – only who is left.’”

(There’s no other way. Then, there’s no one else left.)

A grin unfurls slowly across The Master’s face. He laughs, somewhat hysterically, then shakes his head. “I’ve always preferred to be both. Annoyingly, you’ve always had the better knack for it.”

“Was that a compliment?”

“Certainly not.” (And yet, there’s clear ebony and chestnut; trust and admiration.)

Suddenly, the environment around them begins to destabilise. Time is catching up to them; the streaks of artron energy abruptly freeze, lightning suspended motionlessly. It’s ironic, that the world comes to a standstill when he and The Master are being civil to each other.

“We won’t remember this, will we?” His question is a little absent, a little morose. It won’t matter at all in his case, if he does indeed remain reaped.

“You probably won’t retain it, no.” The Master cants his head thoughtfully. “I might.” (Pulses of turquoise; secrets, secrets.) He doesn’t elaborate as to why he thinks so.

What will it mean for reality, if The Master returns to the War and CHANGES it? (The War should not, CANNOT, be altered. Time Lords and Daleks alike accepted this fact the instant they engaged warfare on the higher temporal plane.) What will it mean for THEM, if The Master doesn’t remember, changes nothing? (He’ll live, and The Master will die.)

He grabs The Master’s wrist, the hand not currently still holding onto him. The Master permits it (with a flash of scarlet, irritation at what the touch reveals); the man’s pulse is thrumming as fast as his own. (The smallest curl of lilac; what does The Master have to be uncertain about? There’s no question of the High Council resurrecting him for the War effort.)

“I don’t want you to die.”

Astonishingly, The Master doesn’t immediately mock this. “You miss me.” He states this without inflection: it’s a fact. (The tone betrays nothing, but the words are a cool green.)

(It’s such a shame, people say, to lament a wasted life and wasted opportunities.)

He doesn’t care if it’s rash, doesn’t care if it humiliates him, doesn’t care if The Master uses the truth to tear him apart. He tightens his grip. “I can’t do this without you!”

(Eight is falling apart; The Master is all that’s holding him together. Five’s regeneration is failing; the man looking out for him calls him Doctor and speaks a number. Three is stranded in linear time and fears being consumed by his own silence; The Master makes noise. One, despite his protests and pleas, is sent to The Psychiatrist alone; The Master tears her mind apart, and helps to piece him back together.)

The Master is (admittedly, expectantly) smug. He drawls, “if you’re not spending your days with me taking up space in your thoughts, then I’m sorry I’ve not made a proper impression.” Meaning, I’m on your mind, so I’m always with you.

“But you’re not HERE.”

“No,” The Master agrees, a little patronisingly. “But you are, I’m sorry to say.” This remark holds no heat behind it. The Master releases his wrist to cup his cheek instead. He smiles mysteriously. (Cream swirls, an expectation.) “Perhaps we WILL see each other again someday, Doctor.”

Time Lords have no afterlife. And, with the exception of the temporal limbo they currently find themselves in, there is only timelessness and nothingness after death. The Master of Death has always known this. (As did Eight.) For The Master to suggest they may meet in the future – and to EXPECT it – is perhaps the kindest gesture he’s ever made.

Quietly (a splash of azure; he’s pensive), The Master muses, “a cosmos without you? Intolerable.”

A cosmos without The Master has been barely tolerable either. “I’d go to the ends of the universe, to find you. Turn back time for you.” But they’re just words.

The Master huffs a quiet laugh. (He’s genuinely entertained by this, but his colours settle into a midnight blue. He’s tired.) The Master doesn’t say anything else but leans in slightly. He does the same and they press their foreheads together.

He lets his eyes fall shut, basks in the rich brown that envelops them. It has an almost physical presence, their closeness. Their friendship has endured so much, and despite everything (despite even themselves sometimes) it’s strong. Unbreakably so. (Proof, that no matter what, they’ll always have each other.)

He feels The Master’s brow furrow (a wink of amber) as his attention is drawn to something.

At first, he thinks The Master’s discerned his colour sense given their mental contact, but the man’s focus is directed inwards.

(Tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap-tap.)

At the back of The Master’s mind is the faint sound of drums.

They startle apart and stare at each other. (The Master is flushed coral, awed at the return of the noise, at what it’s return means, at what it means that HE heard it too.)

He doesn’t understand. He’s never heard the drums before, even when they were younger, and The Master was comfortable enough to let him go looking.

There’s a shimmer of golden light, an aura spilling out around The Master. (Life.) He imagines a similar aura, but white (death), wherever The Master’s being resurrected from. Time has caught up with the man.

He doesn’t want to let go, but the decision’s taken away from him; The Master’s growing translucent. His fingers pass through The Master’s wrist rather than remaining fastened around it. They can no longer touch.

“Doctor,” The Master says urgently. “Doctor. No matter what happens, remember: I –”

And then he’s gone. Leaving only the slightest of hues in his wake. Burgundy; orchid.

(Cruelty; love.)

He’s left alone.

He cries.

(It occurs to him, after a little while, how many times The Master had said the word ‘sorry’ – had it meant anything more than its face value?)

He cries uncontrollably.

Eventually, he runs out of tears. It leaves him exhausted. But where there should be midnight blue, there’s an absence of colour instead. He’s beginning to turn transparent too. (He IS colour; without it, he cannot exist.)

Time has caught up with him too it seems.

It happens fast.

(It hits him like a physical blow: the sense of Time being superimposed, timelines being laid on top of each other.)

(It happened like this: The vase shatters on the ground. The tan car speeds off with a screech of tyres. Peter Tyler lies on the road, his colours slowly bleaching into white.)

(It happened like this: The vase does not shatter. The tan car speeds off with a screech of tyres. Peter Tyler stands in the road, vibrant and still alive.)

(It happens like this: The vase shatters on the ground. The tan car comes to a halt with a screech of tyres. Peter Tyler lies on the road, his colours slowly bleaching into white.)

-

[Time S H A T T E R S. The pieces reform.]

-

The Reapers return him to linear time, to the church. The TARDIS key is in his hand, warm and alive.

Peter is a nice man, and now he’s dying.

He puts his hand on Rose’s shoulder. “Go to him. Quick.”

She does.

[“There was this girl,” Jackie Tyler tells her young daughter. “And she sat with Pete while he was dying. She held his hand.”]

Rose is there for him, and her father doesn’t die alone.

(It’s such a shame, people say, to lament a wasted life and wasted opportunities.)

His jumper is green, but for the first time, he doesn’t lament the shame it represents. He aches with it but, strangely, the blood-red self-directed hate lingering around its fringes doesn’t feel like his own anymore.

(He isn’t sure what prompts the thought, but he misses The Master like a physical ache.)

-

He holds Rose’s hand and they walk back to the TARDIS together.

He hesitates slightly before sliding the key into the lock. (A flutter of fandango, pre-empting the panic attack he’ll have if he finds himself looking at those inner wooden walls again.) He turns the key, opens the door. The console room inside is well lit, the engines humming lowly.

He sets his hands on the console, closes his eyes.

-

His memory of these events is a jigsaw made of pieces from several separate puzzles. The jigsaw is complete, the pieces have been made to fit, but the whole picture makes no sense. It’s also impossible to tell what the original images were.

(He doesn’t understand why he can’t stop thinking that the Nameless man with a bandolier had sepia coloured eyes; nor why he’d expect to associate black-and-dark-red-and-green with The Master if they ever meet again, someday.)

As a calibration test, he programs the TARDIS to land in 1977 on the edge of the school grounds where Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart works, the day before he’s going to receive two letters from an unexpected visitor. He stays only five minutes: he has no intention of leaving the TARDIS or seeing The Brigadier, he just wants to see if the TARDIS will allow the landing. When she does, he heaves a sigh of relief.

(The TARDIS can still bend the Rules at her own discretion; whatever injury she’s done to her body or mind during this, her soul is still intact.)

After he pilots the TARDIS back into the vortex, he picks up the phone. It takes him a long time to dial. When the call connects to the answering machine, he finds he cannot say anything. He stays on the line, as he tries and fails to find words. Eventually, he gives up and hangs up.

(The Brigadier wants him to live with himself. The Master would kill him if he killed himself.)

He’s been shattered by these events, just as Time had been. His broken pieces may have been rearranged, but he can still feel where those jagged edges don’t quite fit together. They cut into him.

Sometimes, he wishes he could leave his past in the past where it belongs.

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -
> 
> Theta – Eighth letter of the Greek alphabet; value of 9
> 
> Nine can’t remember, but a situation in where a Doctor meets his own incarnation HAS in fact happened before – though we’ve not reached the chapter it’s featured in yet ;)
> 
> “If we don't end war, war will end us.” – H. G. Wells  
> “War does not determine who is right – only who is left.” – Bertrand Russell
> 
> Vote Saxon!
> 
> Some dialogue, text and information taken from Doctor Who episodes including; Father’s Day; as well as a plethora of Classic Who episodes; and others are referenced because I am a Doctor Who sponge.
> 
> -


End file.
